Digital Photography Hacks

Take Your Slideshow on the Road

If you go to all the trouble to make a digital slideshow, how are you going to share it with others who are far away? Are you going to lug your computer to every family member you know? Here’s how to take your show on the road, while leaving the computer at home.

Nearly every digital-imaging application on the market enables you to make slideshows, and for good reason. Digital slideshows are much more interesting than their lumbering predecessor: the Kodak Carousel projector snooze-a-thon. Today’s version of this ancient art of vacation debriefing is more tightly constructed and capable of including special effects, music, and voiceovers.

The problem with digital slideshows is that people don’t know how to share them easily with others, especially with audiences who use a different computer operating system. Yes, you could cart your computer to the far corners of the planet in search of audiences for your presentations. Or, you could build slideshows that are so portable they could be attached to an email and sent to family members on the other coast. I’m going to show you how to do the latter.

The key to this portability is tapping the power of QuickTime, that venerable collection of multimedia tools that work equally well on Windows and Macintosh computers. Anyone can play QuickTime content by using a free player. This technology has become so ubiquitous that your camera even uses it to handle its movie-making function.

If, perchance, you don’t already ...