How to find large images in PowerPoint
When you find yourself working on a presentation that has grown beyond an acceptable file size, you know you'll need to find a way to reduce it. The problem is that PowerPoint doesn't tell you which images or other media in your presentation are responsible for driving up the size.
Here are three ways to find large images in PowerPoint files to compress them.
1. Find large images in PowerPoint with Slidewise
Slidewise is a PowerPoint Add-In that summarises all of the media in your presentation, and organises it by type and size. Instantly see where large images are in your deck and jump straight to them. Slidewise comes with a 30-day free trial and is quick to install and start using - here’s how to do it:
1. Download the free trial of Slidewise and open it from the ribbon.
Expand the Images node in the tree to find the large images. They are listed with the largest images first.
Double-click an image to jump straight to it in the presentation, or right-click and select Show in PowerPoint.
Slidewise shows the size of every individual item in your presentation, so you can quickly see any large images, fonts or embedded objects that are driving up the file size of your presentations. Never be stuck again wondering how to find out why a PowerPoint file is so large.
Grab your free 30-day trial of Slidewise today, and see how incredibly helpful it can be.
Prefer to watch it in action? Check out our short video:
2. Find large slides in PowerPoint using Publish Slides
It’s not ideal, but it is possible only using PowerPoint to hunt down the large media in your file. In PowerPoint 2016 and earlier there is a Publish Slides feature (File > Share > Publish Slides), which can be used to approximate the size of each slide.
This feature outputs each slide in your deck as a separate numbered file, allowing you to look through the files in Explorer and see the file size of each slide (see below).
This can sort of work in some circumstances but there are some issues with this approach too, for example, images that are copied multiple times in the presentation are only stored once but when you publish the slides that same image will be inserted into each of the slides. So to reduce the size of your master presentation you will need to delete all the instances.
Also this wouldn’t be ideal if you have a lot of slides, or if you have complicated slides with many objects on them - in which case you may know which slide is large but it’s not always easy to figure out exactly what on the slide is making it so big.
3. Use a PPT Compressor instead
You can use a PPT Compressor like NXPowerLite Desktop, or an online file compressor like WeCompress to automatically compress the entire presentation. This tool will search through your slides finding and compressing any large media, to leave you with a smaller, leaner presentation. No technical skills required - just point it at your file and hit go.