Home : December 20 2012 Computer News : Say Cheese: Four Slideshow Tools, From Simple to Sophisticated

Say Cheese: Four Slideshow Tools, From Simple to Sophisticated

December 20, 2012

You have all of these digital photos stashed away in the corners of your hard drive. They'd make a lovely gift or year-end memento. You could print them out and slide them into a photo album—but that's so 2002, and we're down to the wire for holiday shipping as is. Why not create a slick online slideshow instead? There are several software programs and Web services that can help. Here are a few of our favorites. Add art and animation with Smilebox Smilebox is as fun and friendly as the name suggests. It offers an easy way to create animated slideshows that are heavy on background art and animations, and also includes templates for creating electronic greeting cards, photo albums, and scrapbooks, too. Like most of the applications and services tested for this article, Smilebox calls attention to its free offering. All you need to do in order to use Smilebox is sign up for a free account with your email address. But, like all of the applications and services we tested, Smilebox's free offering is very limited, allowing you to do little more than create and share very simple slideshows. If you'd like to do anything more—and "more" includes accessing many of the most popular slideshow templates, such as the only plain one I could find—you need to pay $40 a year to join Club Smilebox. Doing so gets you access to all of its templates, as well as the ability to share ad-free slideshows in full screen, add music to your slideshows, and store your creations. Smilebox displays your uploaded photos in a column on the left of the screen. It arranges the photos to look like they've been scattered on a table, which is cool, but not as useful as if they were laid out in neat order. And when you add a photo to a slide, it's not removed from the pile, which can be confusing if you're working with a lot of photos. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2021319/say-cheese-four-slideshow-tools-from-simple-to-sophisticated.html