You build a presentation with a few dozen photos, and suddenly the file is 150 MB, takes forever to open and bounces back from email. Images are almost always the reason. A few minutes of preparation fixes it.
Know your slide size
Most modern presentations use a widescreen 16:9 shape, the same as a typical monitor or projector. A full-slide background at 1920 x 1080 pixels fills the screen sharply on a standard HD display. You rarely need more. A 4000-pixel-wide photo placed on a slide that’s displayed on a 1920-pixel screen carries about four times the pixels it can show.
Recommended image sizes
- Full-slide background or photo: 1920 x 1080 pixels.
- Half-slide image: about 960 pixels wide, or around 1000 to be comfortable.
- Small supporting image or icon: 300 to 600 pixels wide.
- Company logo: a few hundred pixels wide, preferably PNG with a transparent background. See logo sizes and formats.
If you’ll present on a 4K display, you can go larger, but for most meeting rooms the numbers above are plenty.
Shrink the images before you insert them
Resizing before inserting is better than resizing inside the slide. Dragging a corner to make a huge image look small on the slide changes how it’s displayed, but the full-size file remains embedded in the presentation. That’s the whole reason decks get fat.
- Resize each image to roughly the size it will appear.
- Export photos as JPG at quality 75 to 85.
- Insert the smaller version into the slide.
If you have a lot of images, handle them together with batch resizing.
Use the built-in compression too
PowerPoint has a “Compress Pictures” option in its picture formatting tools that lets you reduce resolution and delete cropped areas across the whole deck. Google Slides doesn’t offer an equivalent button, so resizing images before upload matters even more there. As a cleanup step, compressing inside PowerPoint after you’ve finished is a handy safety net.
Screenshots in slides
Screenshots of software tend to look best as PNG, since it keeps text sharp. But PNG screenshots of large screens can be several megabytes each. Crop them to just the relevant part, resize to a sensible width and, if file size is still a worry, see how to reduce PNG file size.
Keep the quality good where it counts
Don’t squeeze everything. A hero photo on the title slide deserves good quality. Small thumbnails don’t need it. Spend your file size budget on the images the audience will actually look at.
Emailing or uploading the deck
Many email services cap attachments at around 20 to 25 MB. If your deck is over that, compress the images, or share it as a link or a PDF export instead. Our post on resizing images for email has related advice.
Quick recipe
- Resize full-slide images to 1920 x 1080 or smaller
- Save photos as JPG at 75 to 85
- Insert the resized files, not originals
- Run PowerPoint’s Compress Pictures at the end
Prepare your images quickly with the free online image resizer before you build your slides.