I’ve been wanting to create an automation for these tasks ever since I first did presentation wrangling for all of the 18 or so presenters at the 2014 Wildlife Expo. The best presentations are the ones where the slides are a simple as possible, and presentation is carried by the storytelling ability of the presenter. For these presentations, most slides are simply a single image or video.
The problem with PowerPoint is that when you drop an image onto a default slide, it is put in the same bounding box with the same margins as bulleted text. Now text absolutely needs some margins to make it more readable. However with an image, the visual margins are already part of the image. The image should be maximized to fill the entire slide (and of course centered and cropped as required). Same goes for videos.
So I created two AppleScript apps. The first one—Create PowerPoint slides from photos or videos —lets you drop a folder containing photos and/or videos onto it (or even just a selection of files directly), and uses those files to create a new presentation from them, one slide per file.†
The second one—Resize and align PowerPoint photos or videos on selected slides—operates on the frontmost open presentation in PowerPoint. It will center, scale, and crop the photo / video on each slide that is selected in the slide pane. You can hold down the Command key or the Shift key to select multiple slides at once. Or Cmd A to select all of the slides.
If you are holding down the Shift key when you run the second script, instead of filling the slide with the entire media (which will crop off the wider dimension), instead it will scale the media down so that if fully fits on the slide, leaving black bars to the sides (or possibly above and below depending on the aspect ratio). It’s hard to describe well, so I suggest you just play around with it both ways so you can see the difference.
Caveats: I didn’t do a ton of testing on these, so it might not work in all scenarios. There aren’t any destructive commands in there (like delete), but even so I recommend you always use these on a copy of your files. Also since it’s in AppleScript, they only works on the Mac. I would love to port them to VisualBasic or JavaScript so it can work cross platform, but I would need access to a Windows box, and I don’t have one just now. If anyone wants to take this on, please do so! I’m happy to help answer questions.
* Since I am not registered as a trusted developer with Apple, if I distribute the exported applications you won’t be able to run them without lowering the security permissions on your Mac. So instead, I have provided the AppleScript source code files. You can open them in the Script Editor app yourself, then Export out as an Application.
† For security, Apple has recently added an annoying “Grant Access” dialog box that you need to respond to for each and every image / video file. Here is a good overview of the issue, and also a workaround on where to place your files so you don't have this dialog box coming up all the time.
Works like a dream, many thanks!
Posted by: Neil Woodcock | March 09, 2018 at 06:35 AM