We all know that (say it with me) “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” It’s so true that images can instantly convey ideas, elicit emotions and communicate complex information visually. The thing is, using a lot of photos in your presentations can make the file sizes quickly balloon out of control. But there’s a very simple way to reduce the size of photographs without affecting the way they look.
The Problem
Huge files are not such a big deal if they’re your own presentations, because you can easily transport your files on a USB stick or your laptop. The problems start when you have to share your files with other people. Often, files can be too big to email so you have to rely on a third-party solution like Dropbox. This added step can be frustrating and, for companies with very tight cyber security, not an option.
A client of mine was complaining of this very problem after they heeded my advice about using more pictures in their presentations. They really liked the way their decks looked, but they didn’t really enjoy file sizes north of 50Mb. My usual go-to solution is to open images in Photoshop and resize them for my presentations. “That’s OK for you, Ms. Fancy-Pants designer,” I can hear you say. “But I don’t have Photoshop. What am I supposed to do?” So I dug a little deeper and found a website that does an amazing job in reducing photo file sizes.
Your new favorite website for photo wrangling
After trying several online solutions I came across picresize.com. This amazing website allows you to reduce the file sizes of high-resolution images with no visible loss of quality. What’s more, the site allows you to crop, rotate, flip and add special effects to your photos (all of which can increase file size when you do these things in PowerPoint). You have options for how much smaller to make your photos and what format to save them as.
Yeah, but does it work?
Does it ever! Take a look at the two images below:
Original size 548KB
Reduced to 178KB
Do you see any difference between the two pictures? Neither do I! I started with a relatively small photo as the “before” example so the page would load quickly for you. But you can get some pretty dramatic reductions in file size on large image files, too.
What’s nice about picresize.com is that you can upload multiple files process them all at once. It runs in the background, just as long as you keep the tab open in your browser.
So next time you want to add photos to your presentation, make sure you make them smaller with picresize.com first!
Note: No, I don’t get a commission every time I mention picresize.com. It’s just such an incredible resource that I want you to know about!