Best way to turn university PowerPoint lectures into useful Anki cards with practice questions and images?
Hey everyone,
I’m a university student taking courses such as Biochemistry, General Microbiology, and Biology. Almost all my professors teach directly from PowerPoint lecture slides, and our exams are heavily based on those slides.
I’m trying to find an efficient way to study directly from my PowerPoints while turning the material into useful Anki cards. I’ve tried AI-generated Anki decks, but they haven’t worked well for me. They usually create basic, text-only cards and don’t give me the kinds of questions I actually need—especially application-based questions or cards that use the important images, diagrams, pathways, graphs, and microscope images from my lectures.
Ideally, I want a workflow that would help me:
Generate useful practice questions and flashcards from my PowerPoint or PDF lecture slides
Preserve and include important images, diagrams, pathways, graphs, and microscope images
Create image-occlusion cards where I identify or interpret parts of an image
Generate questions that test understanding and application, not only definitions
Create different types of questions from the same material
Keep everything organized by course, chapter, and lecture
For example, if a Microbiology slide contains a bacterial-cell diagram or a Biochemistry slide contains a metabolic pathway, I want cards that show the original image and ask me to identify, explain, or apply what is shown—not turn the entire slide into a text-only card.
I know I can manually screenshot every image and make every card myself, but I have a large number of PowerPoints throughout the semester, so doing that for every slide would take forever.
Has anyone found a reliable Anki add-on, AI tool, or workflow that can turn PowerPoint/PDF lectures into high-quality cards while keeping the important images? I’m not looking for AI to blindly generate an entire deck—I want a system that saves time while still letting me control the questions and make sure the cards match what I need for my exams.
What has worked best for you?
