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FLEET LIBRARY | Research Guides

Rhode Island School of Design

Accessing Images for Presentations: All the Rest

This guide will demonstrate how to create a slide show in PowerPoint using images downloaded from any of RISD's image databases.

Other Databases

The Fleet Library also subscribes to a number of other databases, which offer a diverse array of images.  Some, such as "Art Museum Image Gallery" and "Bridgeman Education" offer a broad array of art history images from museum and gallery collections, while the Visual Arts Data Service provides a more specific collection drawn from smaller British institutions.  Other databases offer more specific collections of images.  The "Berg Fashion Library" provides images of fashion, world dress, and costume; Cinema Image Gallery includes film stills, hair/makeup shots, and behind the scenes pictures from the movie industry.  "Image Quest" from Brittanica offers nearly 2 million art and non-art related images offering an extensive supplement to materials found in the RISD Picture Collection.

Although their content may be dramatically different images can be downloaded from these resources in mostly the same way. 

  • Start by locating an image that you wish to use in your presentation.
  • Once you have identified a particular image, you must find the largest copy of that image available through that particular resource.
    • Generally this is accomplished by simply double clicking on the thumbnail image.
    • Sometimes there is a still larger image, which may be labeled "larger image" or "expand image"
    • Occasionally you simply click the image displayed to get the largest version.
  • Right click on the image (Ctr-Click for those using Mac) to bring up a context menu where you will have two options:
    • Click "Save Image As..." which will open a dialog window asking you to name and save the image
      • This is the recommended option, as it gives you a permenant copy of the file, which can later be used in other presentations.  Also this will allow for the one step creation of a PowerPoint presentation.
    • Or Click "Copy Image" which will copy the image to your clipboard.
      • Should you choose this option simply open your PowerPoint right click a blank slide and click "paste" and your image will be inserted into the presentation.

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