A Look Back to Animating a Panoramic Photo in PowerPoint from January 2011

Back in 2011, we had a great post here on The PowerPoint Blog with a very cool trick: animate a super-wide panoramic image across a regular slide to create a smooth, cinematic movement. Fast-forward to today, and it’s still a great effect to add energy to your slides—especially with so many widescreen displays and virtual presentations in play.

What makes it timeless? It’s simple, visual, and super effective. No fancy software needed—just PowerPoint and a smart animation. The PowerPoint features have improved over the years, but this technique still delivers a modern, professional feel.

Read through the January 11, 2011 post for  great example and tutorial of animating a super wide panoramic image with a combination of slide transitions and motion paths. The same thing can accomplished in PowerPoint today! But today, we would create this animation a bit different, and a bit faster. Let’s show how we can do this as only 2 slides with image cropping (not available in 20111), and a morph transition (also not available in 2011) to accomplish the same visual. Here’s how:

1. Here is our panoramic image for this tutorial

2. Add image to slide #1 and align to left of slide

3. Crop to slide size

4. Duplicate slide and adjust crop by moving image so right edge is now displayed

5. Add Morph transition


6. Adjust duration (we are going to make it 10 seconds because our image is extra wide)

7. Done!

This is from our Look Back series rediscovering previous blog posts with relevant PowerPoint Tips, Tricks and Examples. The original January 11, 2011 blog post can be found here.