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I'd really rather not need to manually resize large photos every time I'm about to use one as a slide background in Powerpoint. I've searched all over the internet and have only found articles mentioning that approach and never mentioning the resolution of background images.
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I've already tried the "Compress Pictures" feature mentioned here, but it seems not to affect background images. (I know that the large filesize is due to these photos because I tested this by temporarily setting all slide backgrounds to a solid color, and the file size dropped to 1.5 MB.) This is because each of its slides has a different high-resolution image as its background.
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I have a 10-slide presentation that is a whopping 234 MB!
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