I made a slideshow with pictures I made this winter. Please go check it out, and then tell me what you think. Be warned, when you click on the link, you’ll just see a blue Q while it loads the entire slideshow. Please be patient. (My in-house tech support didn’t have enough coffee or time this morning to make it start playing while it loads.)

You learn something annoying every day.

Actually producing the slideshow to display on the web was REALLY annoying. I’ve been working on that sucker all week. Adobe Lightroom, which I use for most of my workflow, is great for making slideshows to display on your computer, from selection and ordering to playing. You can control the transitions and speed to match the music. The problem is you can’t export the slideshow with music. I’d created a slideshow that fit exactly with the music, almost by accident, but nobody could see it unless they were also seeing my messy living room.

So I tried iPhoto. You CAN export a quick time movie with music, but you can’t control the transitions between images, so it was much choppier than the Lightroom version, AND it didn’t match the music. So then I bought Quicktime Pro 7 or something like that, and discovered that I can’t control the transitions there either. I tried some other free programs that sucked for one reason or another, but came back to iPhoto. In the end, I followed the math I found here, which didn’t quite work, but got me close enough where I could tweek it further with trial and error. I just had to live with the choppy transitions.

All this to say:

Dear Adobe,

Please, please, please add the ability to export a slideshow with music to either quicktime or Flash. I mean, you OWN Flash now, so surely it can’t be that difficult to get your Lightroom developers and Flash developers to lunch? Lightroom is fantastic, except for that one thing.

Yours…

Anyways, back to my slideshow, I’d love some constructive feedback on it. On the selection and sequencing of images, and all that. The song is Chad vanGaalen’s “Sing me to Sleep.”