slideshows

Did you know photo slide show service Slide.com is used to create over a million slide show widgets a day? With those slide shows comes serious business, pulling in a monster load of traffic. Taking a cue from that, photo host Photobucket has stepped up its in-house solution with a new slide show tool that's been significantly enhanced from the previous version.

Using some design elements from Flektor, which parent company Fox Interactive Media picked up alongside Photobucket in mid-2007, Photobucket users can now skin and theme their slide shows in various fashions to match the theme of the shots. As an added incentive to step up to the service's $25-a-year pro membership, paid users get an extra 20 shots on top of the 30 that everyone else gets.

Despite these new changes, I found the new slide show creation tool to be a little short on features. It's easy to skin the thing with one of the 20 new themes, but many of the themes don't offer control over transitions or skipping ahead through the photos. This might not be a big deal with a few shots, but once the number gets up to 50, it would be nice to have some form of navigation, regardless of what theme the creator has chosen.

I've embedded one of the new slide shows after the break. To check it out, click the pink "read more" link below.

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I was at a bit of an impasse earlier today while writing about the new Google Maps page that lets you see user adjustments in real-time. A video to show off the feature would have been overkill, while an animated GIF afforded the same view to readers at a substantially smaller file size. Not having Photoshop installed on this machine (which has a pretty simple animated-GIF-making wizard), and not wanting to go through a tedious multistep process using Paint.net, I turned to Gickr.

Gickr is a simple tool that lets you upload up to 10 files from Flickr or … Read more

The Google Docs team, has posted on their blog about the availability of a few new features for Google Presentations to start off the new year. The most significant of the new features is the ability to embed slide shows in web pages. It's not a surprise that Google decided to go this route, given the huge success of embeddable video with YouTube and other embeddable content around the web.

As you can see in my slide show that I have included at the end of this post, it works in a similar way and looks very much like YouTube's embeddable player. Overall, sharing and embedding your slide shows is a fairly painless process. As I said in my original article about Google Presentations, their strong point is collaboration and sharing. This latest feature has continued that trend.

While this is all great, my big problem with Google Presentations is still the lack of a professional look to the slide shows. The feature set just is not quite there yet. I am sure that Google is hard at work, implementing features like transitions, animations, etc., so I can't penalize them too much for that yet, being such a young product. However, if they want to capture any significant portion of the market share, Google Presentations needs the more advanced features.

Other features included in this release are importing slides from other presentations, drag and drop image insertion, and an improved UI. Check out my embedded slide show after the jump.… Read more

SmashMash is a new multifaceted visual editor. It can add motion to still photos, create slide shows, and edit videos and audio. A hybrid app (it can work inside a browser but uses a large plug-in), SmashMash is impressive for its capabilities, although in this early beta stage it's hard to actually make attractive content with it, and it's a bit buggy.

But it's got amazing potential. Just messing around? Take your still photos of people, make their lips move (see also Blabberize), and put words in their mouths. Or take a bunch of slides and create … Read more

Along with "What's the best free video-editing software?" one of the most frequent questions I receive from CNET Download.com users is, "How can I put my photos on a DVD that anyone can watch?" For everyone whom I wasn't able to respond to personally, here's a quick overview.

First off, the most important issue is the DVD player for which you're creating the slide show. Many DVD players nowadays don't need a specially formatted disc to view digital pictures, and some have built-in slide-show features for viewing JPEG images. The … Read more

Goldmail is a new service for creating narrated slide shows. I've seen other multimedia presentation products, but never one as drop-dead easy as this. It's a great tool. And I say this despite the fact that Goldmail's CEO, Guy Longworth, introduced the product to me with worst pitch I've ever heard anyone give a writer: "Text is lifeless." Gee, thanks.

To create a talkie in Goldmail, first you grab your images, either from your hard disk, by taking screen grabs, or by creating text slides in Goldmail. You sort the images into the order you want. Then you press Record, and while you're talking, click the "next slide" button to advance the show (you can also use an audio file from your PC). Goldmail records the transition points. It's a more natural authoring environment than any other I have used.

Once you've created your presentation, you get an option to e-mail it, link to it, or embed it. I like that the app doesn't pretend it's an e-mail client or a blogging tool--but it gives you just what you need to work with the tools you already use.

It's not flashy, though. There's no control for transitions. You can't overlay a music track. You can't embed or record video in a show. And it's far too easy to backtrack and mistakenly erase your audio track. But for creating a slide show, either of photos you want to share with your family or of a collection of slides you want to make into a business or academic presentation, it can't be beat.

One major downside: The Goldmail authoring platform is downloadable software. There's no Mac version. The team is working on a Web 2.0 version that will be open to everyone, but it's not here yet.

The consumer version of Goldmail is free and allows unlimited views for your talkies, but all messages end with advertising. There's a pro version for $9.95 a month that has no ads and that offers tracking, so you can see who's viewing your messages and when.

Longworth says he's already having success pitching Goldmail to nonprofits and other companies who want to send out pitches that tug on the heartstrings, which a talking slide show can, I admit, do better than most text.

The Goldmail site is live now, and I expect the company to make its big announcement on Monday.

See also: Vizzvox and VoiceThread (review).

Read on to see an embedded Goldmail presentation.

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Mobile app publishers are obsessed with creating the fast, flawless mechanism to deliver content to mobile phones. That's great news for users, whose choices for accessing content through apps, browsers, or feed readers grow daily. Viigo for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 5 and 6 is a new contender. See the screenshot-by-screenshot blow in this Viigo slide show.

Incidentally, I've used Ilium Screen Capture (review) to nab my images. It's a great little program for Windows Mobile.

Vuvox is a handy slide show service we've taken a look at before, and yesterday it launched a new tool called Cut-Out Express that lets you cut away at pictures to add embedded photo slide shows. Like the rest of its tools, you can add shots from your hard drive or pull them in from other services like Flickr, Picasa Web albums, or any old RSS feed with photos in it. What makes Cut-Out neat, though, is its lasso tool, which intelligently lets you wrap around a shot like you would using a high-end photo-editing application. It doesn't have a "magnetic" mode, but there's a helpful vertical and horizontal line that tracks the pointer to help you guide around whatever you're lassoing.

The end result is a pleasingly cheesy open area where your photos will fade from one to the next--sure to be a hit with the social-networking crowd, or people who feel like having a little fun with shots of friends, family, or celebrities. Speaking of which, I've embedded a Cut-Out of a Steve Jobs keynote after the break using pictures of historically faked Apple products (via Macrumors Guides). The service also recommends you do the same with your pet's mouth, billboards, and graffiti. Cute.

On a side note, if you're planning on using Vuvox for photo sharing with your family, the service has a neat feature that lets you privatize your content channel. So unlike a service like Flickr, there's no registration or mutual friendships necessary on your recipient's behalf to see your pictures, while they remain unseen by everyone else. All you need to send out is the URL. Unfortunately this can't be done toggled on individual slide shows (yet), but you can add a separate public channel, letting you group together slide shows you'd like to keep separate from your openly shared work.

[via Go2Web2]… Read more

Been looking for a way to get a Flickr slide show on your blog or Facebook profile? Check out SlideFlickr, a dead simple tool for pulling in albums or photo streams in an embeddable slide show. Just drop in a Flickr username, or a URL for a group, photo set, or tag, and hit a big pink button. SlideFlickr will spit out some embed code you can plug into your blog, Web site, or social networking profile. If you're interested in a simpler solution, they've also got a Facebook application that lets you add your SlideFlickr slide shows … Read more