Maintaining image clarity while resizing in Keynote

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Level 1

4 points

Maintaining image clarity while resizing in Keynote

I'm trying to resize an image in Keynote, but I want it to remain clear and sharp when resizing. I'm only doubling an image the size of 25 x 32 pixels to be 128 pixels wide in a document size of 256 x 256 pixels, but it always blurs, and I know Preview has this technology, so if, God forbid, Keynote doesn't have this, I don't know what to do. But I do know for a fact there is a way to make it so it doesn't do this, but I am having the hardest time trying to find out what I need to do, so I decided to come here, for the love of God, to have any help on this.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Keynote Image Clarity

Mac mini

Posted on Jul 14, 2025 7:51 AM

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Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

57,999 points

Jul 14, 2025 10:14 AM in response to sambamNo2

It isn't clear what you're hoping/expecting.

If you have a 25px wide image and you expand it to 128px, that's a magnification of over 5x. Are you expecting Keynote to magically know how to interpolate that 5x and fill in the missing image data? That's not how it works.

For example, this is a 25px wide, 72ppi image of a folder icon from a screenshot of my desktop:

If I scale it up to 128px using GIMP, I get:

which, honestly, isn't bad, given the very limited about of data it had to start with, but it is NOT going to be sharp, simply because there isn't enough image data there. Certainly not like the original screenshot:

In short, garbage in; garbage out. You need a higher resolution copy of your source image.

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