Last month, I began a series of posts on getting information from Accordance into a Keynote presentation. In part 1 of that series, I surveyed some of the resources I’ve been using most often in my development of a Keynote presentation for teaching Sunday School. Among the resources I highlighted were resources with lots of great visuals like the Carta books which are currently on sale. Now that we’ve released several titles from Rose Publishing, I’m now using those books as well.
In part 2 of that series, I showed you how to get formatted text from Accordance into Keynote using Copy As Citation in Accordance and Paste and Match Style in Keynote.
In today’s post, I want to show you the easy way to get images from Accordance into Keynote.
First, let’s look at how to find the right image for your Keynote presentation. Quite often, I’ll just go looking in the Accordance Tool module I think is likely to have the image I want. For example, if I’m looking for a classic artistic depiction of a Bible story, I’ll just open up Bible Art and turn to the passage in question. If I want an image of a Biblical place, I’ll turn to PhotoGuide, or perhaps the American Colony collection. Browsing for images in the most likely places is slower than doing a library-wide search, but sometimes it leads me to stumble across images I hadn’t thought to use. So never underestimate the value of browsing—provided, of course, you have the time for it.
When I’m in a hurry, I typically will enter a search term in the Search All field of the Workspace toolbar. By clicking on the magnifying glass at the left of the search field, I can choose to search by Image and confine my search to [All Tools], [Graphics Tools], or any custom group I happen to create. Because simple key word searches are usually lightning fast, I typically search [All Tools].
Right now, I’m teaching through Genesis 3, and I want to find an artistic depiction of Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden. If I enter “expel” and hit return, Accordance searches all my tools for any image with some form of the word “expel” in the caption. This returns some results, but when I click on each module in the left panel to see the results in the panel on the right, I find that none of these has the image I want. Changing my search to “expulsion” finds even more results, and after scanning through each module I find two artistic depictions of the expulsion from Eden: one in Bible Art and the other in the Rose Guide to the Temple.
I decide I want to use the depiction by Gustave Doré in Bible Art. To use it, I can simply click the thumbnail in the preview pane of the Search All tab. This will open a Picture window and I can simply choose Copy Picture from the Edit menu (or use the keyboard shortcut command-C) to copy the picture at its full resolution. In Keynote, I would then simply select an image on a picture slide and choose Paste from the Edit menu (or use the keyboard shortcut command-V). This will replace the image I selected with the image I had copied from Accordance.
Another easy way to copy images from Accordance to Keynote is to drag an image thumbnail directly from Accordance onto an image drop zone in Keynote. Unfortunately, this can only be done from a Tool tab; not from the preview panel of the Search All tab. So in this case, where I’ve used the Search All tab to find an image, I have to take the intermediate step of opening Bible Art in a tab of its own. This is easily done by double-clicking the name Bible Art in the left panel of the Search All tab.
Now I can simply drag the thumbnail in the Bible Art tab over to Keynote and drop it on one of those image drop zones. This will copy the full-size image to Keynote and size it to fit the drop zone.
By using either of these methods, I can very quickly assemble a series of slides with great-looking visuals.