Poster with a lot of photos!

Sometimes your research poster gets to be a pretty large digital file. That’s almost always because you put in a number of high resolution photos. If the file gets over 10 megabytes in size, it can start to be troublesome to send by email, since many systems limit the size of file attachments.

There’s a fairly simple way to reduce the size of your research poster photos in PowerPoint. We really don’t need photos above 100 dpi in the size they will be printed, and reducing them will not hurt the quality of what you see on your research poster.

In PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, select a photo in your document. Click Format, and then Compress Pictures from the choices near the top. Uncheck the box “apply only to this picture” so it will do all the pictures on your research poster at once. Leave the box checked to delete cropped areas. If your poster is going to be printed at 100%, choose the 96 ppi target output. If we are going to print at 200% (either dimension of your research poster exceeds 56″), you’ll want the 220 ppi target output.