Useful internet software, websites and blogsites.: How To Create Flickr Slideshows

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How To Create Flickr Slideshows

via MakeUseOf.com by Jim Henderson on 11/01/09

You know, the fact is that some folk just don't want to troll through your thousands of images. They like them, but they can't be bothered. What they want is a no-effort option that looks nice. Now.

Enter the slideshow. I'm old enough to remember when it was common for folk who had been on an overseas trip (and everywhere is overseas from New Zealand) to return, get their slides printed, and bore their friends and neighbours to death with hours of images projected on a sheet in a dark room. I know. My father was a member of the inner circle.

Thankfully those days are largely over, and most of you don't have, or want, access to a slide projector, to say nothing of the slides themselves.

The Internet can provide you with a way to release your slideshow tension, without the sheet, without annoying the neighbours, and with a whole lot more multimedia capability than Dad could ever manage.

Flickr is the most likely place to have your images, so let's start there. It's best to bear in mind that flickr's focus is the images themselves, so they don't manage some of the things that slideshow specialist sites can handle, but the capability was upgraded last year and it's quite thorough now. And hey, you're here already, right?

You can, if you wish, create a slideshow of your entire photostream. Unless you have a severely limited stream of images though, this isn't the best of plans. Instead, create a set, order the images in the set as you wish, and then create a slideshow for the set. Share the slideshow, and invite folk to watch it.

Easy, right?

A short note on flickr jargon. A set is an array of images of your own, collected together on whatever basis you like. A collection is an array of sets. For instance, I have a set for each of the suburbs of Wellington that I've taken photos in, and a Wellington collection that pulls them all together. A group is like a set, but contains images from a number of different flickr members. We'll stick with a set for this.

The easiest way to create a set is in the Organizer. I hesitate to spell it that way, but never mind… You'll find it in the main menu in flickr. This thing is a little difficult to screenshot, but you should be able to see your images, in reverse chronological order, along the bottom of the page.

If you have tagged the images, then you will be able to enter appropriate terms in the search box to filter the choices shown. Otherwise you're going to need to scroll to the right with the arrows. In either case, once you see the images you want to put into the set, drag them into the main area of the screen.

I'll wait politely while you do that. Done? Great.

Now click the Add to set button at the top of the page.

Change the name of the set from the default new set, tell us all about the details of the set, below, and click on Save. Try to think of a better subject, and much better title, and fundamentally superior details than I have managed here. Good. Your friends will thank you.

Click the flickr icon, top right, to return to your normal view of the flickr site. Click the arrow to the right of You, and click on Your Sets.

Click on the set you just created.

Nearly there. Click the Slideshow button, top right.

That's it. The slideshow is created, and up and running. There are various options on the slideshow screen for setting options such as fullscreen, enlarging images (called embiggening!), showing titles, and playing in reverse. Just slide the mouse over the top right of the page to see them.

You can share the slideshow from here, or share the set itself from back at the set view. From here, click Share. You'll see a URL you can copy, a piece of HTML you can imbed in your web page or email, and an option to email a link to the slideshow to your friends, assuming that you still have some after all of this.

It's a good idea to construct, by whatever means are the easiest, a start and end slide. These days, scrawling the details somewhere and photographing it is pretty painless. Otherwise there is plenty of software that will add titles for you. Please don't apply them to all the slides though. That gets old very quickly.

Now it just might be that while flickr slideshows are the simplest option, they might not meet your requirements, so here are a few alternatives that offer a little more pizzazz. There are a huge number of slideshow sites out there now. I'm not pretending to know all of them…

flickrSLiDR - allows you to embed your slideshows easily in another webpage.

Flickrin - lets you embed a rectangular block of images in your blog or website, based on your user name or some tags on the photos. Here are some based on 'Wellington".

Capzles - I've discovered this site only recently. This site lets you compose a timeline (like a slideshow) and then add a soundtrack to it. More on that one soon.

So do you construct slideshows? using what? Do you look at slideshows?

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