Hope you all enjoyed Thanksgiving weekend! I’ve noticed that a few of you are using PowerPoint to present your street photography projects, but in at least a couple of places the files aren’t displaying properly. In this email (which I’ll also post to the ITF corner on the site), I want to share a few options and optimizations.
1. Save as ppt instead of pptx.
By default, MS Office files will be displayed by the Google Doc Embedder plugin. (That’s what generates the little “gview” shortcode you see in your post.) Unfortunately, that plugin can’t handle the default filetypes produced by the most recent versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, all of which end in x. The first line of defense is to instead save your file as one of the older types. Use the menus to find File > Save As… > PowerPoint 97-2004 Presentation (.ppt). Upload again, and see if that fixes the problem.
2. Shrink the sizes of your images.
In this day and age, megapixels are so easy to come by that even your phone probably makes huge files, far bigger than you’ll need for web display. You can shrink down the size of jpeg files using a program called JPEGmini Lite, available in the iTunes store.
3. Don’t use Google Doc Embedder.
You can also use other options to post your images: for PowerPoint presentations, one option is SlideShare (slideshare.net), which allows you to upload and embed presentations in the same way you’d embed youtube videos. To see what it’ll look like, check out the ITF corner; it’s what I used to post the Podcasting presentation. Just make sure that you’re happy with your default sharing and permissions options, which could authorize others to use your photos… or not. SlideShare does give you control over this.
Alternately, you can just upload and insert the images the same way you’ve always done for Cultural Encounters posts. Nothin wrong with that.
There are also more advanced gallery tools, such as NextGen, but they can be a little tricksy, so ask me if you’re interested!
Hope this helps,
Ben
