Let's talk about formatting your images. Here are my thoughts on image size, dimensions and cropping. First, I recommend the square 1080 by 1080, at 72 dpi. So your image is going to be square, it's going to be 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels. And I'll show you more about that in just a second. Now on Instagram, you're also allowed to post landscape or portrait orientation images.

I don't recommend that and I'll show you why in a minute. However, if you choose to do so, you want to make sure that your images are at least 1920 by 1080, or 1080 by 1920, depending on the orientation. Also, you can crop in PowerPoint or adjust in PowerPoint. I'm going to demonstrate that later. But you might want to crop your images in advance because it's a little bit easier. It's hip to be square.

Here's why. You can see The image on the left where this young lady has tried to promote her coaching program and she's used an image that's in the landscape layout, you can tell that part of the image has been cut off on the sides. And unfortunately, it's easy to do this when posting your image if you're not careful. The same is true for images that are in the portrait orientation, which is why I suggest you create your images square. And since most people on Instagram are on their phone, you want to make sure that the image looks good on the phone, and your text is readable when it's that small. And finally, when someone looks at your profile, all your images will look great and nothing is cut off.

If you use the square dimension. There's a number of cropping tools. Well, there's a ton of cropping tools online. Here's the ones I want to tell you about. First, there's PicMonkey This is the one I recommend the most. It's super easy, free and very flexible.

The second tool I like is pixel blur. Make sure you Go to pixlr.com for slash editor if you want to try this one out, they've also got some other cool tools, go to pixlr.com forward slash o Matic and check out that tool. It's really fun. And finally, Photoshop calm, which works fine. It does shrink the images, but it does keep them big enough for our purposes. And then aviary, which is another Photoshop company.

I don't recommend this tool because it shrinks the images too small for what we're looking for. And then of course, you may have some tools on your pc or your Mac that you can already use to crop images. Most computers have a built in image editor. And if you don't, you can always download GIMP for free. It's a Photoshop substitute. You can also download pixel or desktop subscription.

It's like $2 a month. If you have Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can always use that and we can also crop them in PowerPoint and I'll demonstrate write that in a future video. So let's go ahead and do a quick demo. I'm on pixabay. And I've chosen an image I want to download. Now you need to sign up for an account before you download images, but it's free and simple.

So I've selected the image, go to the free download button, click the button, and we can either choose the large at 1920 by 1240, because that's larger than the 10 at minimum that I recommend, or we can download the original size. I like to download the largest image I can for the maximum flexibility. So go ahead and download that image. The next thing I'm going to do is go to picmonkey. Now you don't even need to log in or sign up or anything to use this tool. So I'll go to Edit.

I'm going to upload it from my computer. I'm going to select the image I just downloaded. open that file. I'm going to go to the left and click Close. I'm going to select square. And then I'm going to drag the corners so it's full sized.

Then I can drag this back and forth until I'm happy with it. Now I want to have enough room to put text. So I'm going to go ahead and crop it just like that. I'll select Apply and the image has been cropped. Then we click Save. And it gives us the opportunity to rename the file.

We can also choose whether we download in JPG or PNG again, I recommend PNG. We're going to go ahead and leave it at the dimensions shown here. Click Save to my computer. OK, we are done. Now inside my download folder, you can see the original photo and the cropped photo. It's as simple as that.

Now we're ready to bring this image into PowerPoint.