While we’re on the subject of slideshows, Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” takes the concept to a whole new level. And I’m not even talking about the iLife suite (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD) that can produce stunning slideshows with ease and panache. In Tiger, slideshows are integrated at the System level, and accessible by any application that can call upon them. It’s all part of the Core Image-powered visual smorgasbord that is Tiger.

You can create a slideshow from the Finder itself. Select a group of images (Tiger slideshows support many image formats, including .JPEG, .GIF, .TIFF, .BMP, .PICT, and Photoshop, to name a few). Right-click (if you have a multi-button mouse) or ctrl-click (if you have an Apple mouse) the selection of images. From the resulting Contextual Menu, select “Slideshow”. The screen darkens, and the slideshow begins. Each image is displayed for about four seconds, with a sweet cinematic (not the cheesy PowerPoint pixilated atrocity) Dissolve transition between each image.

Move the cursor, and an opaque, floating control panel appears at the bottom of the screen. From here you can Pause/Start the slideshow, move Forward and Back, and Close the show (the “Escape” key does this as well). But there’s more. The default size for each image is the image’s Actual Size. Want to see an image full-screen? Click the “Fit to Screen” button. Click the “Index Sheet” button to see thumbnails of all the images in the show, and click the one you want to bring to the forefront. Obviously, you can use the Forward/Back arrow keys on the keyboard to advance/retreat the slides as well.

You can also invoke a slideshow from within any email message you receive in Apple Mail that has an image (or images) attached. Simply click the “Slideshow” button. When called from within a Mail message, the slideshow control panel gets another button: “Add to iPhoto”. With one click, the image is placed into your iPhoto Library. Very cool.

Say you’re using Tiger’s powerful Spotlight search engine. Within a Spotlight search results window, you find thumbnails of images that match your search criteria. Perhaps they’re in Finder folders or your iPhoto library. Doesn’t matter. Just select the images, and click the small “Play” button to invoke the slideshow (or use the Contextual menu described above).

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski