Take Advantage Of A Variety Of Programs To Compile And Share
Your Photos
Text And Photography By Zachary Singer
Has
one of your friends or relatives ever e-mailed you a whole collection
of their pictures? Wasn’t it annoying to have to download
all those attachments and open each one separately? We’re
probably all guilty of bombarding the people in our lives with
a barrage of e-mailed images, and there’s a better way—send
them a slideshow. Instead of e-mailing an assortment of individual
images, you can take advantage of a wide variety of programs
that compile your selected images and put them all together
in an easy-to-use format.
Slideshow programs
can be grouped by the strategy they use to deliver the pictures.
One approach creates a slideshow
as a single file that can be e-mailed and then run on your recipient’s
computer when the file is opened. These slideshows often
offer automatic, timed slide advance and special transitions,
like fades or wipes, between slides. Some programs allow you
to put multiple images on the screen or to insert a video.
The software differs in the kind of file type it uses to store
the slideshow. Some, like Adobe Photoshop
Album 2.0 or Microsoft Photo Story (included in MS Plus! Digital
Media Edition), create files that require reader software to
open, while others like Roxio PhotoSuite 5 Platinum create a
self-contained program that will run itself: an .exe file. The
Microsoft slideshow uses Windows Media Player to run. Since
the player comes with the operating system, Windows XP users
will already have what they need. If you’re sending a slideshow
to Uncle Edward to run on his Mac, though, he’ll need to
download a free copy of the reader.
If you use Photoshop Album 2.0, your recipients will need to
have Acrobat Reader installed on their computers. Like Media
Player, Acrobat commonly appears on home computers and can be
downloaded for free. The slideshows that use .exe files don’t
need any extra software—just double-click and enjoy—but
they may run afoul of your recipient’s e-mail system. (As
a precaution against viruses, some
e-mail software won’t take .exe files.) They’re also
limited to Windows, so if you’re sending a slideshow to
Uncle Ed, the .exe format won’t work.
Other slideshow programs, like the
one built into ACDSee from ACD Systems, rely on a distinctly
different approach—they create pages on a dedicated Website
and e-mail the site’s address to your recipient.
When Aunt Brenda goes to the link, she’ll see your pictures
as thumbnails on your site’s main page. Clicking on the
thumbnail presents a larger copy of the image. Since the larger
images also offer “next slide” and “previous
slide” links, the site functions as a slideshow.
Generally, the presentation here isn’t quite as slick as
it is in the self-contained slideshows, but Web-based
slideshows are very simple to create and use. They avoid
potential problems with e-mailing slideshow files by relying
on nothing more complicated than a standard Web browser.
