Adding images to your PowerPoint presentations can make them more visually appealing and help communicate your message more effectively. One creative way to do this is by placing pictures inside shapes. This allows you to crop the image to fit a specific shape, creating a more customized and polished look.
In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the step-by-step process for placing a picture inside a shape in PowerPoint. I’ll also provide tips on choosing the right images, shapes, and placements to enhance your presentations.
Why Put a Picture in a Shape?
Placing images inside customized shapes rather than standard rectangles gives your presentation slides a more modern, professional appearance. It allows you to:
- Crop images to focus on key elements
- Layer images and text in interesting layouts
- Reinforce branding with logo shapes
- Illustrate concepts visually with symbolic shapes
- Add artistic flair with curved, angled, or uniquely-shaped picture containers
Using shapes creatively to showcase images sets your PowerPoint presentation apart from the typical bulleted text slide deck.
Choose High-Quality, Relevant Images
The first step is to select visually impactful photographs or graphics that support the topic of your presentation. Consider images that:
- Are high resolution with sharp focus and good lighting
- Convey emotions, tell a story, or illustrate key points
- Feature your products, services, team, facilities, etc.
- Maintain your brand image and style guidelines
Avoid selecting distracting backgrounds or overly complex images. Simple, high-quality pictures in shapes allow the focus to remain on your message.
Use PowerPoint Shapes Creatively
PowerPoint offers a wide variety of shapes from basic rectangles and circles to stars, lightning bolts, hearts, and more.
Consider using shapes that correlate to your content such as:
- Circles and arrows for cycle/process illustrations
- Speech bubbles for testimonials and quotes
- Light bulbs for emphasizing ideas and insights
- Your company logo shape behind product pictures
Feel free to overlap and layer multiple shapes and pictures for added interest. Just be careful not to overcrowd the slide.
Follow Best Practices for Placement
Carefully choose where to place your picture shapes, ensuring they:
- Align to other slide elements
- Have sufficient white space around them
- Are large enough to view key image details
- Don’t cover text or other important slide content
Play around with different picture and text layering options to find what works best for each slide. Keep the layout clean and consistent from slide to slide.
Step-by-Step Instructions
Here is an outline of the exact steps for placing a picture inside a shape in PowerPoint:
- Select a slide layout with sufficient space for a picture shape, or insert a shape onto a blank slide
- Go to Insert > Shapes and select the desired shape
- Drag the crosshair cursor to draw the shape to the desired size on the slide
- With the shape selected, go to Format > Shape Fill
- Choose Picture or Texture Fill from the menu
- Select the image you want from your computer files
- Click Insert to place the picture into the shape
- Resize or crop the image as needed to fit the shape
Remember you can duplicate the shape to quickly add more picture containers with a consistent look.
Enhance Images with Shape Effects
Don’t forget to explore the formatting options under Shape Effects and Shape Fill to further customize the appearance of your picture shapes. Consider adding:
- Shadows
- Reflections
- Glows
- Bevels
- Color overlays
- Image corrections like Brightness/Contrast
Subtle enhancements make pictures stand out while keeping the focus on your slide content.
Summing Up Key Benefits
Placing pictures inside interesting PowerPoint shapes boosts viewer engagement, brand recognition, and memorability. It allows you to display images in a creative way that captures attention.
Carefully selected, well-formatted pictures in customized shapes make presentations more visually compelling. The versatile image and shape tools give you all the elements to enhance your message while aligning to company branding.
Hopefully this overview has sparked some ideas on incorporating pictures into shapes for your next PowerPoint presentation! Let me know in the comments if you have any other tips or tricks.
