hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1835.txt

Episode: 1835
Title: HPR1835: 59 - LibreOffice Impress - Pictures
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1835/hpr1835.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:55:17

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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode
in our Libra Office series and we are still working on impress and we'll be for a while
yet because it turns out there's a lot of stuff that we can do there.
So what I want to do today is bring up the topic of pictures, alright, last time we did
a master page or a template for Hacker Public Radio, that was good, but really what we
want to start exploring the capabilities of this program, what we have to point out
is that impress is inherently a graphical and even multimedia way of communicating.
In fact we saw in the previous tutorials that impress and draw share a common set of
styles that apply to both programs and I have often seen in documentation that impress
and draw are often mentioned in the same breath so to speak, so it is important that we
start developing an understanding of the graphical elements in impress.
I will start this by looking at pictures.
Using pictures in your presentations can add a great deal to the presentation.
This does not only mean photographs, though they are certainly pictures, but more broadly
I think of pictures as pre-existing graphical objects, frequently in a common format
like a PNG, which is portable network graphics, a GIF graphics interchange format, or JPEG
joint photographic experts group.
These can be dropped into your presentation and used as needed.
For example, in the previous tutorial about a template for Hacker Public Radio, I used
a logo from the HPR website that was in PNG format, and a background I downloaded from
a website that was in GIF format.
The other kinds of images you might work with are drawing objects which you create using
draw directly or indirectly via the drawing tool bar and impress, which you can edit and
change using these built-in tools.
Those will be the subject of a future tutorial to be sure.
But this one is about pictures.
Now when you click the new slide button as you're working your way through a presentation,
by default you are going to get a slide that has two areas.
One area at the top is for the title, and the other area at the bottom is for the content.
In the middle of that there is a square that is divided into four quadrants, and each
quadrant is an icon.
And that is for inserting objects.
So in most cases when you create this default slide and it says click to add text, you
probably just click and start typing stuff, and when you do that button in the middle disappears.
So what is happening is impress is looking at saying, oh, okay, you don't want to insert
any objects.
You want to just put content in here.
So it takes the button away and lets you have at it.
Now it works the other way too, as we're going to see, that if you do insert an object,
the text thing goes away.
Now this object thing in the center has four quadrants, and these can be used to insert
objects.
As follows, the quadrant on the upper left is labeled insert table.
On the upper right is labeled insert chart.
On the lower left is labeled insert image, and on the lower right is labeled insert movie.
We'll talk about all of these options at some point, but for now I want to focus on
insert image.
If you know you want an image on the slide, you can insert it here.
But be aware of one thing.
As I said, the default new slide comes with two areas, and these are what are called
auto layout areas.
And if you want to see this, go to that master slide view that we talked about last in
the previous tutorial, and if you click on that, it makes it very clear what's going
on.
There are two auto layout areas.
One is for the slide title, and it's called title area for auto layouts.
And the other is for content, and it's called the object area for auto layouts.
Now this lower area, the object area, is usually where you put in text, such as bullet points.
But if you use the insert image, or actually any of these insert object buttons, the text
ability goes away.
Now you could manipulate your image to make room, and then put in a text box.
But then you are now being governed by drawing object styles that apply to text boxes, and
it could get a bit confusing.
So if I want to mix things, I want to have my normal slide text and put in some images,
you know, want to show what a button looks like, for instance, being an example of that.
I would not do it from here.
Instead, what I would do is I would start creating my text, and then where I need to put in
an image, what I would do is I would then go to the wherever I needed to be, put my cursor
there, go to insert image from file, and select the image I want to put in.
And then, you know, once it's there, you can move it around the screen, as you wish.
We'll talk about moving and resizing and all of that good stuff.
But if you've already started some text content, it's still there.
You can continue to edit, you can continue to add to it, et cetera.
So just a little tip there that might make your life somewhat easier.
Now if you go to insert image, what you're going to do is you're going to get a window
to insert the image.
And it's going to be your standard file manager kind of thing.
You know, go to the appropriate place on your hard drive, find the file you want.
Two things that we want to point out though, there's two check boxes on the lower left
of this window.
One of them is preview.
And if you check that, you will see your image previewed as a thumbnail on the right of
this window.
Which is almost always useful, particularly when you have a directory full of images
to go through.
For example, the media library for myahooka.com website, which is where all of the Libra
Office stuff is hosted, I've got over 100 screenshots.
It can get very confusing when you're looking at and saying, okay, is this button number
two, button number three, button number four, which one am I looking for?
So having preview is very good.
You don't want to get too confused.
The other check box you have here is called link.
And that would put a link to the image without embedding it in the presentation.
Now, that's something I rarely do because it makes sharing presentations impossible.
I've created a number of presentations for myahooka's users group, for talks I've given
it conferences, and so on.
And I always make my presentations available, including placing them on slideshare under
a creative commons, attribution, share-like license, which is how I license all of my content
and how AcroPublic Radio licenses content.
For this kind of sharing, embedding the pictures is a must.
But linking can make sense in some situations.
Here's what the Libra Office documentation says.
When the image file is quite large, and linking rather than embedding will dramatically
reduce the size of the presentation file, okay.
I guess that makes some amount of sense, but that's got to be a huge image.
And again, there's still the problem of, can anyone else use your file?
Second thing they mention, when the same image file is used in many presentations, for
example, when using the same background image for all of the presentations created.
I would think in a corporate environment, you would probably have a standard that says,
you know, we want all of our slides to use this same template that would include a standardized
background image.
Again, having one background image, I don't think it's going to make the file size that
big.
So I'm not sure I'm really compelled by all of that.
And then they say when the linked file will be available when loading the presentation,
for example, if the presentation is a slideshow of holiday photographs.
Now that can get very large.
In fact, I'm going to momentarily discuss how you can do a slideshow of photographs.
And you know, if you get enough photos in there, I mean, even if they're JPEGs, you know,
pretty soon you're getting multiple megabytes.
And in some contexts that might be a bit much.
So if it's any time you're linking, what you basically have to say is every time this
presentation is run, I will have access to these files, either because they are on the
local hard drive or if they're on a remote drive, I will have network connectivity of
some kind.
Strikes me as dangerous, but, you know, there you have it.
We've been looking at inserting images from a file.
When you go to the insert menu image, you're going to see something called photo album.
And that is the coolest thing in the world.
This was a feature that was introduced in Libra Office 4.1.
And once you get to know it, you're going to love it.
This is just awesome stuff.
The idea is to create a slideshow from a bunch of photos.
And when you combine that with automated slideshows, you can have a show of rotating pictures
that runs continuously.
That can be a lot of fun for family occasions like birthdays and anniversaries, and it's
not at all hard.
Now to set this up, first, collect your photos.
They don't all need to be in the same directory, but that might make things a little easier.
The main thing is you've got to know where they are.
And you've identified them and know where they are, go to insert image photo album.
And this will open up a window that says create photo album.
There's a button there that says add.
And when you click that, it's going to open a file manager window.
And so you're going to navigate to whatever directories have the photos you want to use.
Select them and click open.
And this will take all of those files and put them in the window and create photo album.
You can go back and click add and go to a different directory and put in some more.
So that's fine, it's not a problem.
And when you're done, all you have to do is there's a button there that says insert slides.
Well, guess what happens?
You click that and every single one of your photos becomes an individual slide in a slideshow.
Now if there's a lot of photos, this will take a little bit of time to do that.
There is some crunching of data going on in the background to do this.
So don't click the button and think it's just going to pop right up.
If it's only a handful of photos, it'll probably be pretty quick.
I did a test with about 50 photos and it seemed to take over a minute.
And you might say, well, over a minute, it's not that long.
When you're sitting in front of the monitor and you've clicked the button and nothing is happening,
let me tell you, a minute feels like eternity.
You start thinking, I click the button again, but it's just taken a lot.
Now, all of these photos become individual slides in your slideshow.
Then what?
Well, what order do you want these photos to run?
The order they're in by default is probably going to be the order they appeared in the file directory,
which is alphabetical by filename.
And that may have nothing to do with the order you want them to run.
So what you do is, in your presentation, go to the slides order and just put them in the order
that you want them to be in.
And when you've done that, you will probably want to run it automatically.
Now, this is not hard.
The trick is you need to put in a transition for each slide.
Now, on the right-hand side of Libra Office Impress, there's a sidebar.
And the very far right, there's the icons for the different things you can do in the sidebar.
So locate the one for slide transition and click it.
And then in the window that opens in the sidebar, down towards the bottom, there's an area
called advance slide.
And there's two options.
One is on mouse click, and the other is automatically after, and then you select the number of seconds.
Five seconds, I think, is good, but decide what works for you.
So select automatically, select the number of seconds, and then right under that, there's
a button that says apply to all slides.
All right?
So if you do that, you can then run a slideshow that will, if you selected five seconds,
it'll put each photo up for five seconds, and then that photo comes down, and another
one appears.
And it just go through the whole thing.
Now you probably want it to keep going in what we call kiosk mode, where when you get
to the end of the presentation, it just goes back to the beginning again.
Well, if you want to do that, go to the slide show menu, and select slide show settings.
And in the window that comes up, there's a section called type.
Make sure you select auto, and then the amount of pause before it restarts, which can be
as little as zero, in which case it would restart immediately.
Now if you want to see what this is like, I created a slideshow, which you can download
and run, which is on the website, link will be in the show notes.
So you can download this, you can see pictures of me as a young man, and my lovely bride,
of course.
Then from a scanner, all right, this is another way you can get photos into your presentation.
You can do it directly from a scanner.
I'm not going to talk about how you set up scanners, that's taking me very far afield.
So I'll just assume it's, the scanner is connected to your computer, it's operating properly
and you know how to use it.
If those are issues, you need to look for help somewhere else than a Libra Office tutorial.
But assuming you're ready to go, place your object on the scanner, then go to the insert
menu, image scan.
Now if you've not done this before, you have multiple scanners, you'll first need to
select source.
But if you've been scanning with this one source, it probably is already known, and you
can jump right to request.
Then preview the image, crop is necessary, and click scan.
Impress will insert the scanned image into the slide, and from there you can use the formatting
tools that I'm about to describe.
Now personally, I would probably scan the image to a PNG or a JPEG file, and then insert
it like any other image above, but you may find this handy.
Now formatting.
In Libra Office Impress, you have some simple built-in formatting options that are good
for quick and dirty image manipulation.
But they are not at all equivalent to a real graphics or photo editing program.
Still, you can do some things easily.
The first thing you might want to do is resize an image.
I find I need to do that fairly often.
So click on the image to select it, and then you should see the eight handles.
The eight handles are the little squares that appear in the middle of each side and in
each of the four corners.
And you can drag a handle to resize your image.
It chances are you all know how that one works.
So if you choose a handle in the middle of a side, you will stretch or shrink the image
in that one dimension.
If you select a corner handle, you can change both dimensions simultaneously.
One thing to be careful of is that as a rule, particularly with pictures, if you change
both dimensions unequally, the result will be bad.
To make sure you maintain the aspect ratio, that is the ratio of the two dimensions, make
sure you hold down the shift key first before selecting the corner handle and keep the
shift key down until after you have released the mouse button.
That will preserve the aspect ratio of the image.
Also note that resizing bit mapped or raster images can result in significant degradation
of the image.
You will frequently get better results by using a proper image editing program.
I happen to like CRETA among the open source offerings, K-R-I-T-A, GIMP is also good.
You may have another program that you are a fan of.
I think if it was an actual photo, I definitely would use an image editing program to resize
it.
But if it was a simple graphic object, I might just do it inside and press.
Also there is a position and size dialog that lets you do resizing with a little more
control.
With position that gets us to moving the image, if you click on the border that contains
the handles, but not on a handle itself, depending on your operating system either a four-way
arrow head cursor or a hand cursor, or if you have some odd operating system, maybe something
outside.
Those are the ones I run into.
Now when that happens, you can click and drag the image to a new position, but what people
sometimes don't realize is that you can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move
the image.
That can sometimes give you a little bit better control.
I mentioned the position and size dialog, and that's in the format menu.
You've got a format position and size, and that pops up a dialog that is going to let
you do some fairly precise positioning and sizing changes.
I'm not going to go into details about all of that.
If that's something you want to know more about, you can go take a look at that.
The last of the things I'm going to mention here in image manipulation is rotation.
Now sometimes whether it's scanned or coming from a file or whatever, your image is just
rotated wrong.
It's upside down or it's sideways or something and it's okay, you've got to fix it.
Click on the image to select it.
If you take a look on the line and filling toolbar above, there is a rotate button, and
it's like a circle with an arrow head.
When you see that, that lets you rotate.
You click that button, then move your cursor over one of the corners of the image over that
corner handle, and your cursor will turn into a circle with an arrow head.
At that point you can click and drag to rotate the image and get it the way you want it.
If you want finer control, take a look at that position and size dialog that I mentioned
and the first tab is position and size, but the second tab is rotation.
It's going to allow you to actually plug in some numbers and have more precise control.
This completes our initial look at pictures in impress.
I think for the next go, I'm going to take a look at a feature called the gallery.
I think that is important enough to deserve a whole tutorial all by itself.
This is Huka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and reminding you as always to support
free software.
Bye bye.
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