compressing pictures

[djsundt54]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

Working in older versions of PPT on PCs, I was able to batch compress all pictures in a presentation to control file size. Now it looks like I have to individually compress photos before inserting them. Is there a work around or different, less time consuming solution?

 

[Jeff Chapman]

In PowerPoint Preferences, under the Save section,
you can set the "Compress graphic files" option, which
I assume will compress all of the images in your
presentation. I haven't experimented with it much
myself, so I can't tell you if it works on everything
you've already inserted, only on images you insert
from that point on, or whether it compresses during
save or rather during insertion. PowerPoint Help
wasn't much help, either.

Anyway, this might solve your "batch compression"
issue, anyway. Give it a try and let us know how it goes.

Jeff

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

In PowerPoint Preferences, under the Save section,
you can set the "Compress graphic files" option, which
I assume will compress all of the images in your
presentation.

This may've changed in 2008 but through 2004, this setting governed
compression on images created when you use File, Save As and chose one
of the various JPG/PNG/ETC image types.

It didn't compress images within the PPT itself.

In 2008, the new PPTX file format is actually a standard ZIP file.
You can open it in a zip/unzip utility and if you prowl around the
various folders within, you'll find one named something like Images.

Inside that, you'll find the images you've added to your presentation,
or in the case of images that weren't originally PNG/JPG/GIF, it'll be
the images, converted to whatever format PPT has decided to store them
in.

And having come that far, you could then extract the images, batch
downsample them, drop them back into the original folder within the zip
and save.

To a much smaller file. Voila.

 

[Jeff Chapman]

Steve - This is really a fantastic feature of the
OpenXML format. But one thing I'm stuck on, is how
to recompress the files back into a PowerPoint
presentation after you've edited them.

For instance, I used Stuffit Expander to expand
a PowerPoint 2008 file, and it then creates a nifty
folder with all of my files. I edited an image
inside the "media" folder that was located within
the package, saved it, did a right-click on
the folder containing all of the files belonging to
the expanded PowerPoint .PPTX file in Finder, and selected
"Compress... Folder", using Leopard's own compression
feature.

However, that doesn't seem to be doing it for me...
when I double-click again on the file in Finder,
it complains that "There was an error accessing
blah-and-blah file." So, no joy in getting the pieces
of Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

It needs to be reZIP-ped, I assume? Wondering if
that is what Leopard's built-in "Compress" is really
doing, or maybe it's instead got its own proprietary
compression feature. Hmph.

Jeff

 

[Jeff Chapman]

Ne'er thee mind. I think I've figured it out.
Here's what I did to edit the images:

1. Expand the .pptx to a folder using StuffIt Expander.
2. Hunt inside the folder for the image.
3. Edit and resave the image.
4. Select all of the CONTENTS that were created when StuffIt
expanded the .pptx, NOT the enclosing folder. (Heh, made this mistake.)
5. Do a right-click on the contents in Finder, and Compress.
6. Drag the resulting Archive.zip file OUT of the folder and onto
the desktop or another relatively haphazard-free place,
rename it with the .pptx extension, and then double-click to
reopen in PowerPoint.

The interesting thing is that the original image's location
and dimensions haven't changed on the PowerPoint slide,
but if you reduce the size, it will effectively be downsampled.
And like you said, this would be great news for someone
who wants to selectively compress or edit certain photos in
PowerPoint. Heck, it's time to run my presentation photos
all through the ol' warming filter in Photoshop! Ya-hooo!
(???)

Wow, this is so, so much more transparent than the old PPT...
very flexible, and worth the extra data space it may take
to store the file vs. the old binary format!

Jeff

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Steve - This is really a fantastic feature of the
OpenXML format. But one thing I'm stuck on, is how
to recompress the files back into a PowerPoint
presentation after you've edited them.

It's been a while since I used Stuffit so I'm not familiar with the ins and
outs. In case it lights the fuse on the AHA light, what you can do in
Windows is:

Double click the file to open it either in WinZIP or as a folder (Win
Explorer in XP or higher can open ZIPs natively).

Locate the file you want, drag it to the desktop.
Edit it there.
Drag it back into the ZIP it came from (which you've thoughtfully left open
to the correct folder).

For instance, I used Stuffit Expander to expand
a PowerPoint 2008 file, and it then creates a nifty
folder with all of my files. I edited an image
inside the "media" folder that was located within
the package, saved it, did a right-click on
the folder containing all of the files belonging to
the expanded PowerPoint .PPTX file in Finder, and selected
"Compress... Folder", using Leopard's own compression
feature.

You want to open the images in an image editing program, downsample them
then save them back to the same filenames. I'm guessing that compressing
the folder will just zip them or something like that.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Wow, this is so, so much more transparent than the old PPT...
very flexible, and worth the extra data space it may take
to store the file vs. the old binary format!

In theory, the new format should take up less file space than the old binary
format too.

Oh, and even in the old format, you can save to HTML, find the folder fulla
files it makes and find the original images there. Resample, open the html
back into PPT.