Thoughts On Presenting & Design

If you’re like me, you like to take advantage of the power of visuals to not only get your point across, but also increase retention of that very message.  To get those visuals, you can use your own photographs for the ultimate in originality, stock photography for professional, yet expensive and unoriginal images (if you use the popular ones, that is), or go to flickr for an image with a Creative Commons license you can live with.

I tend to prefer the latter when I don’t have what I need in my own personal library.  Though there are times that call for stock photos, my employer surely won’t pay for them.  Searching for the images at the Creative Commons portion of flickr can be time consuming as you’re sifting through the stuff that just won’t cut it.  Behold.cc is a great service that highlights what appears to be the best of the best from flickr, but I do wonder how much is put into keeping it up to date.

The Viewfinder interface

Enter Viewfinder.  I first heard of this great app while listening to MacBreak Weekly.  In one of the recent episodes, Don McAllister recommended Viewfinder as a great way to get images from flickr.  Intrigued, I decided to give it a try.

The great thing about this application is that you can hone your search in on Creative Commons images, including restricting it to those that are permitted for commercial use and/or allow for derivative works.  You can sort your images by relevance, interest, or date.  You can also specify a minimum image size.  Along the bottom, you can even use the slider to make the thumbnails larger or smaller.  Another nice feature is the quick-look feature that allows you to zoom in on an image with the press of the space bar.  Of course, no image search app would be complete without the ability to set one of the images as your desktop wallpaper.

The image inserted into Keynote

Those features are great in and of themselves.  However, what really sets this apart is the button that inserts the image into Keynote automatically.  This feature cuts steps and makes inserting images into  your slides literally a one-click process.  If there’s one feature I’d like to see, it’s the automatic insertion of copyright information into the slide.  This is important if you’re going to live up to your attribution responsibilities with cc-licensed images.  As of right now, it’s up to you to do that yourself.

Now, this app isn’t free, but if you’re a Keynote user like I am, the introductory price of £15 ($24.48 as I write this) or £19 when version 1.1 ships is well worth it.  A non-expiring demo is available, but it limits you to two downloads per launch and each is delayed by 30 seconds.  Surely fair if you’re looking to try before you buy.