How to Find High Quality Images for Your PowerPoint Presentations with Google Image Search

PowerPoint users have long sought the use of search engines such as Google to find and download images to use in presentations. These images are often of variable quality. The low resolution images tend to become pixelated if scaled up and lose clarity when projected during presentations.
If you are working on a PowerPoint presentation that requires visuals to support the content, then the proper use of Google Image Search can yield high quality images. These however can be under varying copyright laws and regulations, so you will have to ensure that the image you end up choosing is free to use and share in the public domain and royalty-free.
To find high quality images using Google Search, go to the Google Image Search page and type the name or kind of image you want. For example, if you are making a PowerPoint presentation on the history of actuarial science and need a picture of Edmund Halley who was the first to demonstrate the use of a life table to calculate insurance premiums, then type Edmond Halley into the search field. You will get the following page with the search results:

Now that you have all possible search results, how can you figure out which image is of the highest possible resolution for your PowerPoint presentation? This is simple – the size of each image is given below its thumbnail:

This image is only 284 x 361 pixels. For a PowerPoint presentation, the image should ideally be at least 800 x 600 pixels. Going down the search results page, we find that this image fits the criteria:

Now to save the image, make sure you don’t right click on the thumbnail and save it – only the tiny thumbnail will be saved as a result of this action. You have to click on the thumbnail in the results and page and go to the source page:
 

Click on the Full-size image link on the right hand side:
 

Save the image from the linked page. You can then insert it in your PowerPoint presentation on the history of actuarial science:

If you want to ensure that the images you use don’t infringe on copyright issues, then read this post on how you can use Flickr’s Creative Commons-licensed images in your PowerPoint presentations.
Do you need business graphics or data visualizations created especially for your PowerPoint presentations? Then contact us today to get professionally designed visuals for your PPT.

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