With ImageLoop, creating a slideshow is very easy. You can either upload a bunch of photos from your hard drive or import them from an online service that stores photos. The only requirement is that all photos must be in JPG format. Fancy a Flickr photo that isn’t yours? No problem, ImageLoop lets users import photos from Myspace and Flickr just by typing in the username, not just their own.

Once the photos are uploaded, you can customize the look and feel of your slideshow, and add descriptions to your photos as well. Once the slideshow is ready, you can email it to your family and friends or use one of the available embed codes to publish it on the internet. ImageLoop also allows you to decide just who can view your slideshow by changing the access levels. If you want to go back and change the accessibility, you can do that too.

ImageLoop is free to use but it does require registration. This is obvious otherwise users would not be able to edit their slideshows. Once registered, there are no limits on the number of slideshows a user can create.

As far as ease of use is concerned, the service ranks highly. The compatibility with social networks also scores well. Another bonus is the ability to use photos that do not belong to the user. However, this is a double-edged sword because if a user posts a slideshow with copyrighted pictures, he or she could get into trouble.

Overall, I think ImageLoop is a good service, especially for people always sharing pictures with their friends over social networks. What are your thoughts on ImageLoop and photo sharing? Let me know in the comments.

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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.)

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Slide Presenter offers a better one. It is a php based script that can run on any server that supports PHP. The administrator can create new presentations by adding images of the slides to it. Users can then connect to the website to see the current slide. The administrator manages the progression and decides which slide is currently seen on the website, much like a local presentation but with the major advantage that people from all over the world can connect and view the PowerPoint presentation online.

The presentation that has been created in Microsoft PowerPoint has to be saved as image slides which can be done directly in Powerpoint using the File > Save As menu. Just select a different format, jpg for instance, before saving the presentation. PowerPoint will then ask if you want to save the current slide or all slides. Select all slides which has the result that all slides of the presentation are saved as images.

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