My Mac Keynote (latest version) always defaults to adding a shadow when I drag an image onto a slide. Is there any way to change that default so Keynote doesn’t insist on adding a shadow to every PNG/PDF/JPG?
Nobody? There must be more people here using Keynote. Nobody drags images? Or does everybody just prefer shadows? 
I tried Keynote help, but that turned out to be surprisingly useless. 
What template are you using? What happens if you use a different one?
(I cannot duplicate your issue.)
I use Keynote, but
a. this doesn’t happen to me, so
b. I don’t have a suggestion as to how to fix it.
Other than what @jajvj1 suggests
Thanks, guys. I’m using a standard template we have here at our department.
I’ve just tried using a blank Keynote slide (“White”) and there I don’t get the shadow. It’s not obvious to me how you change such a setting in your template. I can edit the master slide, but there’s no obvious setting there (at least to me) where I could deselect the shadow.
To change the shadow on a specific image (or any other object), you click View > Inspector > Show Inspector then select the image and the shadow options should be under the Inspector’s Style tab.
How old is your department’s template, could it date from an era when Keynote’s own default was to apply a shadow? Maybe you can create a new departmental theme, replicating the features that you want without the image drop shadow.
I’m not optimistic about changing an existing theme to not include the shadow. I saved a theme as a .kth file, changed the file extension to .zip and unzipped it to look around. A setting like drop shadow for images is likely to be in one of the .iwa files, either Index/DocumentStylesheet.iwa or the particular MasterSlide .iwa file. .iwa files are in a binary format used in all the “iWork” applications, maybe someone who knows their way around a hex editor could figure it out by saving two versions of a theme, one with and one without image drop shadows.
Thanks, Curtis. It’s perfectly clear where he shadow gets set. The problem is that in a master slide there is no obvious way to turn that default off. You can select/deselect a shadow for a specific element once it’s selected, but the entire shadow settings pane remains unaccessible as long as you don’t select a specific element. Under those circumstances it’s not clear to me how you’d tell Keynote what the default would be for any new element.
I don’t believe the template is that old, but I think it was originally generated from a MS PowerPoint template. I could attempt to recreate it, but that sounds like a lot of work for somebody who’s got as little desktop publishing skills as I. Maybe something for a rainy winter night.