Wow Slider displays a basic functional interface on startup. Photos can be added by drag and drop, or by clicking on the plus icon in the header to import photos, photo folders or import photos from Flickr or Photobucket.

The pictures that have been added are displayed as a thumbnail with the option to add a description or url to them.

Photos can be sorted in the program interface as they are shown from top left to bottom right in the slideshow. The sort option under Images > Sort helps with that task by offering to sort all photos by date, file name, size or caption. It is furthermore possible to rotate images so that they can all be viewed directly in the slideshow without turning heads.

A click on Publish opens an extra window with options to save the slideshow. Here it is possible to save it to a folder on the local hard drive, publish it directly to an ftp server or insert it into an already existing HTML page.

Users should switch to the Images tab in the Publish Gallery window first for options to configure the slideshow.

This options page is easily overlooked and the developers should consider showing it to the user directly before the publishing page.

Six different slideshow templates are available with further customization options on the right. It is possible to configure image qualities (which is important for web publishing as it directly relates to loading times), the delay between slides, transition effects and duration and the image size.

The slideshows can be opened with any modern Internet browser. It is unfortunately not that easy to send them via email as there are multiple files involved and required.

The homepage of Wow Slider links to slideshow demonstrations that have been created with Wow Slider. (via)

But there are also extensions that are created by Google and Slideshow is one of them. Slideshow is an excellent extension for viewing image and photo slide shows on the Internet. The extension is currently compatible with the following four popular photo hosting websites: Flickr, Google Picasa, Facebook and Google Images.

The slide show extension will automatically recognize additional photos on pages on the supported websites and display those photos in a thumbnail bar at the bottom of the screen. A click on any of the thumbnails will load the photo in the slideshow view. This recognition process takes a while depending on the number of photos found on the website.

The photo slide show extension will also display a slideshow icon in the Google Chrome address bar that indicates that a slideshow can be opened that displays the photos hosted on that page.

The user viewing the slideshow can load new photos with the mouse by clicking on them in the thumbnail bar at the bottom of the screen. It is furthermore possible to use the left and right cursor keys on the computer keyboard to navigate in the slide show instead.

A click on the x icon next to the image name will close the slideshow and return the user to the page the slideshow was launched on. Slideshow is an interesting extension for the Google Chrome web browser, especially for users who regularly visit at least one of the supported websites. The photo slide show extension is comfortable to work with. Only the lack of supported photo hosting websites and the delay until the slideshow controls are displayed are something that Google should be working on.

Slideshow for Google Chrome is compatible with version 4 of the web browser. The extension can be downloaded from the Google Chrome website.

Update: The Chrome Photo Slide Show extension is no longer available on the official web site. A alternative is the Slideshow for Facebook, Flickr, Google Images extension which is also available at the web store.

The site makes creating a video presentation easily: to create one, all you must do is simply upload some pictures, or import them from a website, upload a song, or choose one from their, and finalise it. The presentation can then be shared or downloaded.

Whilst you may think you can do all of this in a desktop video editor such as Windows Movie Maker, animoto does it much quicker, has good production and analyses the sound and pictures and mixes them together to ensure they flow well. Humans have an input too; deciding the order in which to put the pictures, the ability to add text and ability to put more emphasis on particular images.

Slideshows speak better than words, so view mine of my holiday in Poland in 2007.

Unfortunately, animoto has some limitations.

In order to have higher-definition presentations or to make them last longer than 30 seconds, the user must pay. To remove the time limit, it’s either $3/video or $30/year and to allow them to be at DVD quality, you must pay $5/video. This may sound expensive, but in my opinion it’s worth it if you need to put on a good presentation. Only full-length videos (ie those you’ve paid $3 for) can be downloaded.

An application is also available for iPhones so you can view animoto presentations on them.

animoto allows presentations to be shared straight into most social networking sites like MySpace, Orkut and Facebook and images can be imported from Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook, Photobucket or Picasa.

(Thanks to Azhar Chougle for introducing me to animoto.)