Hi Rob,
Thanks for posting - and sorry you're having trouble. It sounds as though the image's quality is suffering because it's being down-sized upon insertion. In Presentations, any images larger than 1024 on a side are resized to fit within a 1024 bounds (we do this to optimize performance - important for a web application).
Here are some tips from one of our fine engineers:
- For the best looking images, pre-scale your images to fit the size of the presentation before you upload them; for reference, the slide canvas is 720 pixels wide and 540 pixels tall. Any image larger than those dimensions is larger than it needs to be on the client so you and your audience are downloading more data than they will ever see. If you resize your images to fit the size it will appear on the screen, you will have a better looking image.
- The choice of image format makes a difference at this scale as well. For image with smooth transitions like photographs of landscapes, jpeg is a good format. For computer generated diagrams like charts, or images with lots of details like text, PNG is a better format.
- It is important that the image be scaled to the appropriate size before uploading because the server will recompress any image it needs to scale using JPEG compression. So if you are uploading a PNG image with transparency, you will loose any transparency effect if the image is large enough to require scaling on the server.
I hope this is helpful, Rob. Please let us know if you have any further questions.
Best regards,
Rebecca
