Table of Contents
Creating slide masters in PowerPoint
26. March 2026
Table of Contents
PowerPoint uses Slide Masters to let you create templates for your presentations. Slide Masters use placeholders to store content; this topic discusses how FotoWeb Desktop for Office works with placeholders.
Placeholder priority concerns
When using placeholders in your master slides, Picture placeholders take priority over Content placeholders. In practice, this means that when using a slide such as the one below, which has both a Picture and a Content placeholder, if you double-click a picture or graphic file in FotoWeb Desktop for Office, it will be placed in the Picture placeholder first. If your template contains several picture placeholders, FotoWeb Desktop will populate the Picture placeholders first, then the Content placeholders, then any other placeholders in the order in which they were created.
However, if you want to place a picture in a specific placeholder, you can highlight that placeholder first and then double-click the image you want to insert from FotoWeb Desktop.
Differences between Picture and Content placeholders
You will notice that when you insert a picture into the Picture placeholder, the image is cropped and sized to fit within the picture frame. Also, an image smaller than the placeholder will be stretched to fit inside the frame. This is how Office handles content within the placeholder and, as such, is beyond the control of FotoWeb Desktop for Office.
When placing files in a Content placeholder, the placeholder scales the picture to fit its width and adjusts the placeholder frame's height accordingly to eliminate dead space. Because the Content placeholder's height may vary depending on the proportions of the picture you place in it, you will need to account for this when creating your master slides.
The screenshot below illustrates what happens when FotoWeb Desktop places a landscape picture into a Picture placeholder (left) and a Content placeholder (right). While the Picture placeholder retains its size and centers the image, a Content placeholder adjusts its height to accommodate the full picture.
