Monday, October 25, 2010

Slideshow creation: Microsoft vs Google

If you have a bunch of pictures to show off to a crowd, what do you do?
Sure you can do a Powerpoint, insert pictures and all sorts of animations and text to make it cool. It is a VERY time consuming to do so if you have more than a handful pics.

Much quicker is just run a program to works with a certain directory and create slide show automatically, preferably with music background.
Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft's photo viewer has basic slideshow ability. That one has very basic functionality, just image changing, no other effects, hard to even tweak how many seconds per picture.

Windows 7 is supposed to be much better in everything. Yes its slideshow viewer is much more sophisticated than XP! But the only problem is this: it doesn't let you sort by date created. The slideshow is in some order that I dont' even know what this is. Come on, I sort by Date Created, and hit the slideshow button in Explorer: FOLLOW IT!!! Your predecessor XP can do it, why not you!

There is also Windows Media Center thing that looks fancy but do wacky things that freezes my machine. Windows 7! Enough praise about you.

Sure go online to see what I can tweak? Some says Windows Power Toy, some says tweak registry. You just have to tweak registry, huh?

Enter Google Picassa, a fairly quick download and it does things right. It organizes your pics and can do slideshow easily. It even lets you tweak your pics. This is a great app to have.

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