You’ve done it! The music rises with a swell, but not loud enough to eclipse the “oohs and ahhs” from your audience, as the final photo in your slideshow, showing the blazing sun setting over Popham Beach, dissolves into view. All your hard work has paid off, and you get the satisfaction of sharing your slideshow with others. But how can you extend the reach of your slideshow past your desktop monitor, laptop screen, or video projector, and make it portable so you can send it to your far-flung family and friends?

Now, I’m not talking here about just placing your photos on a website somewhere so people can click through the individual photos, or even click a “Play” button and have them play in sequence automatically. I’m talking about recreating your slideshow photo-for-photo, transition-for-transition, note-for-note, just the way you painstakingly put it together.

As you embark on building a truly portable slideshow, you need to ask yourself two important questions. One: what kinds of end products are myself, my computer, and its hardware and software capable of creating? And, two: what kinds of end products can my intended audience watch? For example, your computer may have the coolest slideshow-to-DVD software and a blazingly fast DVD burner. This won’t do you much good if you’re creating a slideshow to send to someone with no DVD player in their computer or next to their TV (yes, these people still do exist).

What do I mean by “end products”? I’m referring to the file format into which you export your slideshow so someone who doesn’t have the same software you used to create the slideshow can view it. To create a fully portable slideshow file, your software must be able to package within the exported file the images (actually, copies of the images), the music (actually, a copy of the music), and the rendered transitions (if you used transitions like dissolves or fades). This file could be anything from MS PowerPoint to Windows Media Video to QuickTime video to an executable file containing a small application that plays the show.

Remember, as with any digital media, even with today’s advanced compression/decompression capabilities, there’s always a trade-off between quality and file size. The bigger (screen size, resolution, file size) the photos in the show, the larger the resulting slideshow file. This file size should be a consideration in how you plan to distribute the slideshow. For example, you might be able to burn a slideshow at full size onto a CD, but have to reduce the size to email it or place it on a website.

So what kinds of formats can you use to proliferate your photographic prowess? Let’s start looking at some options and some pros and cons. We’ll finish up next week.

You could construct your slideshow with presentation software like MS PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote. Then, just send the whole PowerPoint or Keynote file to your audience. On the plus side, your audience will see your show exactly as your produced it.

Or will they? In order to reduce file sizes, some applications will “reference” original photos and music in the slideshow file (and in export formats like movies) rather than actually copying them into the file itself. When the show is played, the photos and music are called into the show and displayed when needed. However, if the show is played on a computer where the photos and music are in different locations (or it doesn’t have the photos and music at all) the good stuff will be missing.

More ways to distribute your digital dexterity next time.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski