Master Keynote: 15 Essential Tips

3.5 How to Add a Background Image in Apple Keynote

Custom keynote templates like those found on Envato Elements offer countless stunning layout and background options. They're well-suited to all purposes and give your slides new styling, simply not found in generic free templates. But sometimes, you might want to go totally custom on this slides background, that's where adding a background image comes in. Background images take your photos and push them behind your slides content. Gone are the days of generic backgrounds instead, let a favorite photo do the work. I'm working in the Nixen template for keynote, which I downloaded from Envato Elements. I'm creating a marketing presentation and I want to build an introductory slide, my vision is to have a quotation overlaying a background photo. This will be visually stunning and sure to capture an audience's attention. And thanks to keynotes features and elements, powerful templates, I can accomplish this in just a few clicks. To make it easy, the first thing I need to do is find a slide that fits my needs. Ideally I need one with some text overlays built in and a blank background. Slide number 6 here looks promising, so I'll go ahead and click to preview it. Now it's time to begin work on our image background. If you have images of your own to insert great, but if not Envato Elements comes through again. Elements has recently added a stock photo section with thousands of amazing royalty free images available to subscribers. For a low monthly rate you can unlock unlimited downloads not only a professional keynote templates, but stunning photos to go with them. I'll jump over to elements here and as you can see, we've arrived in the stock photo section. The elements catalog is robust enough to have images of virtually every description, so it's really just a matter of knowing what to search for. Since I want to feature a quote about success, I think a shot of a mountain climber might work great. I'll type this into the search box here and elements will return results, I'll browse through the options until I see something I like. To view in more detail, I can click on the Thumbnail, elements will open it larger preview with added descriptions and more. I really like to look at this image and think it would make an ideal background for my slide. I will go ahead and click Download here in the upper right corner, a pop up menu will appear asking me to specify a license used for the photo. I can choose from prior options or enter a new user in the text box. Remember, even if you stop subscribing to the elements, you will still be licensed to use files you downloaded from elements for their original purpose. When I'm finished, I will go ahead and click on Added download, elements we'll go ahead and download the image file and I can jump back over to keynote to start using it. Okay, I'm backing keynote and I'm ready to add the background image. I'll go ahead and click on the Format tab here in the upper right corner, you can see these options here that really outline the look and feel of my slide. I'll select the background option and then click on this drop down, there are different fill options here and image fill is the one to use. I'll click on it, this Choose option will appear and I'll click on it. In this pop up, I can browse to where my image was downloaded on my computer and click to insert it. I'll also have some options here about how to scale the image, in other words, how to neatly fit it onto the slide. Scale to fill is perfect if you need to complete fill with no distortion, I'll go ahead and choose it in a flash keynote will insert the photo on my slide scaled perfectly. All I need to do now is start rearranging the text placeholders on the slides to neatly overlay my image, I can drop in a quote and adjust the font and text color options to make it stand out a bit better. As you can see in just a few clicks, I've created a stylish and totally custom background image layout for keynote. Thanks for watching