The Mac’s Best Photo Slideshow Maker Monday, February 10, 2014 My Mac is loaded up with about 20,000 or so photos, mostly stuffed into iPhoto for storage, but thousands of the better photos also in Aperture.
My Mac is loaded up with about 20,000 or so photos, mostly stuffed into iPhoto for storage, but thousands of the better photos also in Aperture. I’m just getting into using Adobe’s Lightroom.
My plan was to end the year with a review of my favorite Mac photo slideshow maker but time has a way of slipping by, tripping over plans along the way. So, belated, but not forgotten is a look at what I consider the Mac’s best photo slideshow maker,.
Let me explain. Making a photo slideshow and turning it into a video is child’s play on the Mac.
IPhoto does it with a few clicks. Drop photos into an album. Select Export Slideshow. Adjust the movie size. Click the Export button. A photo slideshow as a movie. What if you want a photo slideshow with individually controlled transitions between photos, or with a specific music or audio soundtrack, or a slideshow with floating text over the photos, or even with movie clips embedded in the slideshow?
No can do in iPhoto, but that’s actually child’s play in FotoMagico. Think of a mashup of iPhoto and iMovie. Grab photos from an album in iPhoto or Aperture and drop onto FotoMagico’s timeline. Each photo can have it’s own floating text, it’s own transitions between photos, and even an individually controlled effect. FotoMagico’s elegant controls produce broadcast quality HD results with smooth transitions, pixel movement text and text movement, and well timed audio. Speaking of audio, FotoMagico makes adding a soundtrack to the slideshow product an absolute breeze.
Not only can you mark specific spots in the audio waveform with markers, you can add narration over the sound. Timeline controls make it easy to create a robust mixture of photos, sounds, effects, transitions, and onscreen text which rivals high end production systems for movies and television– all from the safe confines of your Mac’s screen. Photos can be scaled, rotated, zoomed or panned, or moved anywhere on the chosen screen resolution, and transitions adjust accordingly. A finished slideshow can be shared via DVD or Toast, exported in a variety of QuickTime video formats, perfect for iPhone and iPad, or displayed in high resolution on HD TVs or projectors. Because FotoMagico is a professional level tool it needs the right hardware. I’ve had issues with it on an aging MacBook with 4GB of RAM, but zero problems on my quad-core iMac with 16GB RAM and an SSD, so your mileage may vary. Regardless, you can download FotoMagico and use a limited trial license to take it for a test drive.
Unfortunately, the test drive is a mere five days. FotoMagico is a pro-level app with plenty of features and five days just isn’t enough to become comfortable with all it can.
- The best When it comes to presenting and making presentations, Powtoon succeeded in creating a whole new category of presentations. Forget bullet points, templates, and files on your computer. Powtoon is an online tool that allows users (PC or Mac) to easily create animated stories for presentations or explainer videos. Slides are only used to manage content while creating the presentation which, when on screen, provides an easy to grasp narrative.
If you are a Google Drive user get excited because Powtoon integrates really well with it. Powtoon is great with voice overs, and allows you to integrate a great script with fantastic animated characters. 2. – The Simple PowerPoint alternative Google Drive Presentations: one of the best free PowerPoint alternative We work a lot with Google applications and they are great alternatives to some Microsoft applications.
You may already be familiar with Google Drive, and if not then we highly recommend checking it out. Google allows users to get started with presentations super quickly and efficiently.
It looks just like PowerPoint but is much easier to use. What can we say, the software was built by geeks and it shows! While the aesthetics of the presentations are quite lacking, and the templates are too basic, it is, however, very strong on collaborative work. Creating PowerPoint like slides has never been easier. Google Drive Presentations: one of the best free PowerPoint alternative Many people use Google Docs presentations to start their creation process and then switch over to more robust programs. 3. 280 Slides – The Aesthetic PowerPoint Alternative 280 Slides: one of the best free PowerPoint alternatives 280 Slides is one of those unknown, “no one has heard of”, slideshow apps that surprisingly has quite a large user base. That’s because presentations made with this program look just like Microsoft PowerPoint fancy edition! It’s easy to use and many users often create slides in Google Docs or PowerPoint and then import them into 280 Slides to get that fancy, fun feel. A quick search online shows that many of the presentations created with 280 Presentations end up on SlideShare, and other great features include auto save and recovery (also available on Powtoon and Google Docs). You can also export your slideshow back into PowerPoint if you want to share your presentations or have a collaborative aspect.
4. – The Professional PowerPoint Alternative SlideRocket is an expensive web-based presentation application. SlideRocket offers a limited free option with the ability to import from PowerPoint and export to PDF. The higher price comes with many features including sales team collaboration and more, which is quite unique. The slide transition effects look great on the screen and resemble Flash more so than PowerPoint. You can also integrate content from sites like Flickr and YouTube, as well as utilize plug-ins in each one of your presentations. If you want great graphics and lots of templates, and are willing to pay up when the time comes, this may be a really good option for you. It’s still a slideshow, but a really, really good looking one.
5. – No Slides PowerPoint Alternative Prezi became very popular because it was the first to offer a real alternative to the typical slideshow format of presentations. It’s still the best option for what we call “non-linear presentations”.
If you need to hop around a lot this is a good option because Prezi allows the presenter to skip to any part of the presentation with ease (unlike PowerPoitnt where users need to move back or forth one slide at a time). Conclusion Are you over PowerPoint yet? Clearly it has lost the title of the Best Presentation Software. Here is what we have to say about the various options:. Powtoon – Best free presentation software, best.
Google Docs: Best Simplified PowerPoint Clone. 280 Slides: Best for good looking simple Bullet point presentations. Sliderocket: Best Collaborative slideshow software. Prezi: Best non-linear presentation software.