Pretty as a Picture Create Photo Albums in PowerPoint Helen Bradley
Wed 6/12/02 -- Summer holidays are just around the corner, and you're sure to return with a bundle of digital images of your real-world vacation. So why not share your experiences with friends and family by whipping up a digital photo album that you can send as an e-mail attachment or post on your Web site for viewing with any browser? You probably already have a great tool for the job -- no, not Yahoo Photos or Kodak PictureCD; Microsoft PowerPoint.
You think the Office presentation package is an unusual choice for family snapshots? Think again -- it has a great photo-album tool, it's easy to use, and it gives you good-looking results with next to no effort. Just check it out:
Get the download. If you're using Office XP's PowerPoint 2002, the photo-album tool is built in; if you're sticking with PowerPoint 2000, you need to install a wizard. Visit the Photo Album Add-In page for a download link and installation instructions.
Create an album. Get started by creating a new blank presentation in PowerPoint and choosing Insert/Picture/New Photo Album (in PowerPoint 2000, choose File/New, the General tab, and PhotoAlbum.pwz and click OK). You'll see the Photo Album dialog, from which you can add pictures from disk or directly from your scanner or camera. (You may want to skip the latter; PowerPoint's own tools for editing and cropping images are rudimentary -- limited pretty much to rotating images left or right plus adjusting brightness and contrast in version 2002 -- so you'll do better to touch up images in your favorite photo-editing program before opening PowerPoint.)
Order your images. Select File/Disk to add images stored on disk (hold the Ctrl key to select multiple images at a time). Adjust the order of the images using the up and down arrow buttons below the "Pictures in album" list (to the right of it in PowerPoint 2000).
Determine the layout. The default layout option puts one full-size image on a slide, but you can choose an alternative from the Picture Layout list -- displaying, say, two or four images per slide, with or without a page title. Selecting an alternate option also allows you to choose a Design template to decorate the page background and a frame or edge for the photos.
Big blurbs or small captions. To add some descriptive or journaling text on the page, click the New Text Box button. This adds a text box to the photo list -- it's the same size as and replaces one of the images on the page, so a two-picture layout becomes one pic plus a text box; a four-picture layout becomes three pics plus a text box. You can add multiple text boxes if required.
To add a caption box below each image on the page, click the "Captions below all pictures" option. The default caption is the image filename, which you'll almost certainly replace with your own text.
Create the album. When you're ready, click Create to create the album pages. If you're using PowerPoint 2000 you'll be warned that you can't alter the album using the add-in dialog again; however, the album is a standard PowerPoint presentation, so you can always change it manually using PowerPoint's tools. You can alter a PowerPoint 2002 presentation by choosing Format/Photo Album.
Once the album is created, you can add your titles, type descriptions into the text boxes you created, and add short captions to the images. You can adjust the background by choosing Format/Slide Design and selecting either Color Schemes or Design Templates. Again, since the photo album is a PowerPoint presentation, you can add more images or shapes such as callouts using the tools PowerPoint provides.
In fact, if you've made changes to a PowerPoint 2002 album such as customizing the background or altering the size of the images, avoid using Format/Photo Album to add more images to the album. Instead, create a second album, copy the new slides, and paste them into the original album to complete it.
Share the result. To share your album, you can save it to disk using the Pack and Go wizard and distribute it (together with the PowerPoint viewer) to anyone with a Windows PC. You can also share the file with anyone who has PowerPoint -- just zip (compress) and e-mail the .PPT file. If you have a Web site, use the File/Save as Web Page option to create an HTML version of the photo album; upload it to your site, and anyone using a browser can enjoy it.
