6

I found an old PowerPoint slide I made, but I really want to find the original image that I imported to the slide. Is there a way to find the name of the image, upon which the slide is based (e.g., I inserted 'imageFoo.jpg' into my slide). I'm sure it's in one of my hard drives.

I have tried exploring the properties of the image (right click, format image), but the closest I got to the original is its size property. Googling didn't reveal the answer.

Improve this question
2
  • Which version of powerpoint? Can you click into the image and see it marked? If yes try to export it. If you are lucky you can see the name and directory.
    – Mensch
    Feb 25, 2015 at 22:11
  • Windows 7, PowerPoint version 14.0 (Office Professional Plus 2010)
    – neuronet
    Feb 26, 2015 at 0:42

7 Answers 7

Reset to default
4

If your powerpoint file is an .pptx you can try this: Rename your samplename.pptx into samplename.zip. Open the zip-file and check all subfolders if there is a pic in it. Hopefully it has its original name.

Yes, new powerpoint standard (.pptx) is a zip-file containing xml-files and others.

Improve this answer
2
  • This is also true of .docx files as well. I believe LibreOffice files are also just zip archives.
    – Scribblemacher
    May 5, 2016 at 18:01
  • 1
    This is a great trick, but unfortunately it only has "imageN.png" for my images (N=1..4), which is not their original names.
    – neuronet
    Dec 5, 2017 at 15:29
3

I don't think there's a direct way. The only method I'm aware of is to select the image and choose Format > Picture... and look at the Alt Text field, specifically the Description. PPT seems to insert the name of the file (without a suffix) as the alt text description.

enter image description here

At least in PPT 14.4.8 on the Mac, this is the only location of the actual file name. In this slide, Wet_horiz.jpg was the inserted image.

Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    Nice trick, unfortunately those fields are blank for me. I thought on an earlier version of PP (like, 10 years old) it showed the original filename. Perhaps I could open with a really old computer? :)
    – neuronet
    Feb 26, 2015 at 0:42
2

adding .zip to the end of the pptx and opening it in xml mode worked a treat. I could see what type of picture and the name of the picture. I could then go back to the designer and ask them to change JPG pictures to PNG because that does not degrade in quality

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    PNG is perfectly capable of degrading in quality, and JPG is perfectly capable of keeping quality. It all depends on the compression. Google lossless vs lossy, then edit your answer to exclude false information.
    – PieBie ♦
    May 5, 2016 at 17:30
  • 3
    How is this different from the answer by @FrankL? graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/48959/40004
    – neuronet
    Dec 5, 2017 at 15:29
1

Save the Powerpoint file as a PDF. Make sure that 'Document Properties' are checked in the Save options. Open the PDF file and hover on the image for a second.

The full path will be displayed like a tool-tip. I think this is the path on the authoring-computer where the image file lived. So you should probably be looking on the hard-drive of that computer to find the original image files.

Hope it helps!

Improve this answer
2
  • Hi Prateek, welcome to GDSE and thanks for your answer. If you have any questions, please see the help center or ping one of us in the Graphic Design Chat once your reputation is sufficient (20). Keep contributing and enjoy the site!
    – Vincent
    Nov 2, 2015 at 13:18
  • Seems promising, but unfortunately this doesn't work I didn't see any 'Document Properties' option? I saved as pdf, but when I hover I don't see anything. When I right-click and select 'save as' it just auto suggests the name of the document, not the image name.
    – neuronet
    Dec 5, 2017 at 15:32
0

What I ended up doing was pretty ugly. Since I knew what computer the image was on, I just added the most likely folders to Microsoft Photo Gallery, and it automatically shows a thumbnail of every image in the selected folders. An ugly hack, but it found my image in seconds.

So it isn't really an answer to the question as stated, but a solution to my problem.

It would be nice if MS added this feature to power point: save the name of the image you loaded!

Improve this answer
0

I don't believe any version of PowerPoint has ever preserved the path/name of inserted pictures, though it's possible that at one time PPT included this information as ALT text; it doesn't now and hasn't for quite a few versions back, in any case.

There are add-ins that can tag inserted images with the full path of the inserted image, but unless you used such a thing in the first place, there's no way to recover the information.

Improve this answer
-1

I copied the image, pasted it into/attached to an email. It is an ugly, horrible way to get the title, but it works.

Improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.