Simple good looking slideshow

October 29, 2008 4:56 PM

Need software to make a good looking slideshow with effort and time approaching zero.

I need to slap together about 200 photographs into a slideshow presentation. This is a dumb job I'm stuck doing. It has to look professional but I don't want to spend more than say 60 minutes doing it.
I need:

- Simple but nice transitions, hopefully pan-and-zoom.
- To be able to see the names of the files while I'm editing this so I can insert white-on-black text slides at the appropriate places.
- To have a logo visible at all times in a corner.
- To output to a video file or something dead simple for the client to run in a loop

I'm on Vista. Thanks in advance for taking some of the annoying out of a dumb task.

posted by signal to computers & internet (8 comments total)

PowerPoint should do the trick. It is simple, has transitions you are looking for, and set up you want. Otherwise some online type options would work, but have less flexibility.
posted by maxg94 at 5:00 PM on October 29, 2008

PowerPoint doesn't show me the names of the files, I think.
posted by signal at 5:17 PM on October 29, 2008

www.animoto.com is great for flashy slideshows, but it won't address items 2 and 3.
ACDSee would cover 1, 2 and 4, but not the logo... perhaps ACDSee if you can find a macro to batch insert the logo in the corner via photoshop?
posted by perpetualstroll at 5:49 PM on October 29, 2008

Google Picassa will do slideshows with transitions and export to avi movie or other options.
posted by acro at 6:01 PM on October 29, 2008

Microsoft Photo Story 3

Free, quick, easy. You can slap all of the photos in, make a title and add music. You can also change the panning and transitions but you don't have to.
Easier than Powerpoint by a longshot, at least in my experience.
posted by sisflit at 6:53 PM on October 29, 2008

Seconding Photo Story.
posted by niles at 8:19 PM on October 29, 2008

Looks like you need to run Photo Story in compatibility mode, since it was developed for XP.
posted by lukemeister at 8:44 PM on October 29, 2008

I use Boinx FotoMagico and it rocks!
posted by silsurf at 10:32 AM on November 25, 2008