Research Guides: Presentations: PowerPoint and Beyond: Images, Videos, & Audio

Embedding

Embedding images, videos, or audio can transform presentations to be more engaging and dynamic. It also makes it easy to access the media from within the presentation rather than having to move back and forth between a presentation and other software.

Be sure the images and videos you select are open access and cite the source!

Examples of Media Sources

Google Images
Find a multitude of images. After running a search, use the search tools button (underneath the search box at the top), to limit Usage Rights to find images labeled for reuse.
Flickr
Photo management and sharing site and the terms of use or a contact name are generally displayed. To easily pinpoint images for use in teaching, presentations, and classwork limit to "Commercial Use & Mods allowed."
Everystockphoto
A search engine for (mostly) free stock photos.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
ARTstor is a digital library that contains hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images of art, architecture, and archaeological artifacts. Each image is accompanied by descriptive information. The Auraria Library's subscription to ARTstor also offers ArchiVision (architecture) and Shared Shelf (images created and shared by campus faculty). ARTstor includes an OIV (offline image viewer). Images may be viewed and analyzed in the OIV, using features such as zooming, panning, saving groups of images online for personal or shared use, or creating presentations to be delivered either online or offline. Some functionalities of ArtStor including creating folders and using the OIV are only available on laptop or desktop computer.

YouTube
Includes lots of useful academic content. Watch and upload videos and share it with others.
Vimeo
Home to many high quality videos appropriate for college research. No ads but user needs to register to watch and share videos.
Freesound.org
A huge collaborative database of audio snippets under Creative Commons licenses allowing their reuse.

Create Your Own

You don't have to use previously created media content in your presentation - you can use your own images, photos, videos, and audio. Below are examples of media tools to create media.

Screencast-O-Matic
A free account with Screencast-O-Matic provides 15 minutes of recording time, free hosting (15 min per upload), a record web camera, the ability to publish to YouTube HD, and the ability to publish to MP4, AVI, FLV movie format.
Audacity
Free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for multiple operating systems.
SoundCloud
Tons of music! Register for access. Some content is free for download. Users can also upload and share music and other sound recordings on SoundCloud.

Copyright

Strategies for Fair Use (Purdue OWL)
Using Copyrighted Material in Your Presentation (Think Outside the Slide)
Information on how to incorporate copyrighted materials into presentations. One of many of this site's articles on best practices in slide based presentations.