thinking out loud

The most popular photosharing and hosting site of all. Very good user interface. Clean, easy to follow and quite versatile. In addition to uploading images from their own computer, users can also upload from mobile phones and web addresses (for instance you might have a picture in another location like a blog that you’d like to add to a slide show). Once images are uploadedl they are displayed album style with direct links helpfully shown below each picture (to make it easy to add them to an email, a post in a forum or a personal blog). Edting your slideshow is straightforward and there are a range of display options to choose from. One may link to a completed slideshow or grab the necessary code to include a show in a blog, forum post or ordinary web page. A remix mode alllows you to create slideshows from stills images and short video sequences. Easy to see why this is so popular. Images did not show compression artefacts. Easy to see why this is so popular. About the only niggle was not being able to pause a show or control how long images displayed. However, if you use the remix facility, it’s possible to set the ‘dwell’ time of an image from 1-10 seconds. Interesting note too, the remix part of the site is powered by Adobe’s Premiere Express. Professional users may want to spend USD25 a year to get 50 image slideshows instead of the lower resolution, 10 image limit that applies to free users.

Slide.com is apparently a popular slideshow and picture sharing site.

I’ve had a bit of a play with it, but cannot see how to embed a slideshow in this post. Instead, I can only link to one here

Here are some thoughts on the slide.com experience…

Slide has one of those slightly frenetic looking homepages that could be described loosely as adhering to the conventions of social networking sites in both appearance and functionality. It is quite easy to select and organise a slideshow, which is as it should be. There are any number of slideshow modes to choose from and you have a variety of customisation options. There is a limited music library from which you can choose a suitable soundtrack for your images. The biggest plus is that slide makes it very easy to add your slideshow to the most popular social networking sites (eg Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc). However, it does not appear to provide code for embedding in sites other than those listed. Instead, you are left with the less than satisfactory option of linking to your slideshow. What’s more, it would seem that the site aggressively compresses uploaded images (there is no way to control how the images are processed after uploading). The shots in the example show a fair amount of degradation from the originals.Click here to see how it works.

I created this slideshow with an online application called Slidez [LINK TO SLIDEZ] and then embedded the code in this post. Because it needs to fit this layout, you can’t see the images at full screen size. To do that, you need to CLICK HERE to visit this gallery on the slidez site.

Slidez has a very web 2.0 interface, ie clean and quite straightforward to use. The site was in public beta when I tried it out, so things may have changed when you check it. Registration is free and you aren’t charged to keep your slideshows on the site. I also liked that it created a unique sub-domain for me (mine is realsurf.slidez.net) and that it offered a number of editable display options. You can re-arrange the order of image, add labels and captions and email friends about your latest show, or embed it the way I have in this post.

All pictures were taken with my Nokia N95.

Slidez is due to update their site on the weekend of 6-7 July.