Reorder Pictures in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Most positioning tasks in PowerPoint for your pictures such as resizing, aligning, and grouping are easy to achieve. In addition, you can also reorder pictures (or even a bunch of pictures and other slide objects such as shapes) on your slide quite easily using the various ordering options available within the program.

Look at Figure 1 which has three slide objects, where two of them are pictures and one of them is just a rectangle shape. We want to reorder them so that the rectangle is placed between the larger and the smaller pictures.

Figure 1: Pictures and Rectangle placed on the slide

Follow these steps to learn more about reordering pictures in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows:

1. Select both pictures and the rectangle. Then align them to the center, and then to the middle of the slide. To learn how to align and distribute pictures and other slide objects to the center of a slide, refer to our Align and Distribute Pictures tutorial. When we aligned the pictures and the rectangle on our slide, the resultant slide ended up looking like what you can see in Figure 2, below. Note that the smaller picture (the flower) has been rendered invisible. This picture was intended to be our primary focus object for this slide. We now need to correct the order of pictures and other slide objects.
2. 
   Figure 2: Small picture hidden behind the rectangle
Note: The result of applying align to center and middle options may be different, depending upon the present order of your slide objects.
2. To achieve this objective, you can reorder the slide objects using any of the following ways:
   
   1. Use the Arrange options. To learn more about Arrange options, refer to our Reorder Slide Objects tutorial. The linked utorial pertains to shapes, but the concepts explained are applicable to all other slide objects, including pictures.
   2. Access the Selection and Visibility pane. In this pane, select the smallest picture which is now at the third place and hidden below the big picture and the rectangle, as shown in Figure 3.
3. 
   Figure 3: Small picture selected within the Selection and Visibility pane
4. Now, use the up arrow to move the small picture right above the big picture and the rectangle. Figure 4 shows the small picture is now atop everything else.
5. 
   Figure 4: Small picture re-ordered
3. After reordering, you can see the resultant arrangement of pictures on your slide, as shown in Figure 5.
4. 
   Figure 5: Pictures and Rectangle reordered properly
Note: To learn more about how to work with slide objects listed within Selection and Visibility pane, refer to our Select, Deselect, View, and Hide Shapes Using the Selection and Visibility Task Pane tutorial.
4. Save your presentation.