Wandering Parent: Slideshow Generators in Review (One Independent Source)

As a post-pandemic celebration, my family splurged by vacationing in Norway. We figured it was our last chance to tour his grandmother's native country with her as our guide, given her age.

I returned with over 1,000 photos (no joke) of our 10-day trip. Our Norwegian and American relatives alike are awaiting my compilations of the journey and I have been wrestling with slideshow generation software for weeks. Having worked as a Senior Technical Writer, managed a creative staff, and helped develop in-house proprietary software, I feel I am above average in my computer savvy. Yet, none of the software I am working with come close to the discontinued Picasa. Yes, that is a worn-out statement made by many over the years. But the level of frustration I feel with the "alternatives" in 2022 -- years after Picasa became unavailable -- warrants repeating that sentiment because it represents a failure (in my mind) of companies to offer a product that can accomplish its objectives.

Here are the basic functions I need/want in a slideshow generator:

Maintain order of uploaded images and videos or allow 'sort by' options that include "by name"
Maintain size and edges of all photos (i.e. no automatic cropping)
Play the entirety of each video or allow video editing customization within same program (i.e. do not slice up my video using some algorithm that presumes to know what I want)
Allow captions for each photo/video
Provide caption/text editing tools (including placement on slide and font type, size, and color)
Auto fit text onto slide/image (below image is fine too) or allow easy resizing
Display all photos in album/collection (i.e. do not pick and choose for me)
Provide background music options
Let me download a viewable production of the completed slideshow

So far, most of the generators I'm seeing overcomplicate some things while limiting others. Or the software tries too hard to do everything for you, eliminating the ability of the user to decide how the slideshow should be set up.

My needs boil down to these things:

Can I edit the order of appearance of or easily sort/organize my photos and videos?
Can I add text to each item/slide and customize that text?
Are there built-in templates and/or music tracks to present the collection?
Can I save and share my slideshow for others to see?

These feel like obvious asks that most users want: a way to customize the order of photos, captions, and presentation, then to share it with friends and family. While each person will want or expect different features, the fact that users still mourn Picasa says something about what's available in the market.

The following product reviews are based on my experience and needs only. I am not affiliated or incentivized with any of these companies. This is one independent source.

Why am I writing this post? While searching for the right product to try for this trip's slideshows, I read more than ten reviews of the so-called "best products on the market", only to discover that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM was biased content designed to highlight their sponsored product. These review articles were essentially ads. I understand that tactic. The institute I worked for before did the same thing. No judgement here. But I would have liked to see a sincere review with all the quirks, realities, and opinions of an independent reviewer. So here you go: my limited review of nine slideshow generators.

1. Vimeo

One key problem I had with this software was that it reorganizes/randomizes your uploaded photos in a way that can't be fixed. My photos have a specific order to them and I'd like to be able to sort them by name or retain the order I have them in my desktop folder. If neither that option or ability was available, the software wasn't worth my time. So I passed pretty quickly over this one.

2. Animoto

This software required pic by pic insertion and customization, which seemed too tedious to bother trying further.

3. Google Photos

Although Google Photos is great for viewing and saving photos to a free cloud (15 GB limit), it does not show description text (captions) in the slideshow.


Info Description view of sample photo shown here in attempt to produce caption

Nor does the text you added via the Edit Album view appear in the slideshow.

Snapshot of Google Photo Album Edit mode with text inserted below line of photos

Furthermore, its Sort function is limited to three options:

Oldest first
Newest first
Recently added

When you're working with hundreds of photos, reordering each one in a long scrolling window would take forever. The photos were taken and labeled in chronological order by default when I transferred them onto my computer from my camera. I need the slideshow/photo collection software to maintain their order or resort by name. None of these sort options organized my uploaded photos in a meaningful way. To be clear, the Album Edit view does allow drag and drop reorganizing, but it would be better if there were more automatic sorting options (for my purposes).

4. Microsoft Photos

The default photo editing software on a Microsoft PC using Windows 10 provides a decent slideshow creator. I generated a slideshow for a previous set of photos easily and seamlessly a few years ago. The musical cues were spot-on. The customization options covered everything I needed. The templates were fun and versatile. And I was able to share it on my social media without a hitch.

So what happened? Why can't I do that anymore? I'm still trying to track down the reason. In the meantime, I experimented with the software again to compile slideshows for this much larger collection.

Microsoft Photos knows all and sees all. Any image downloaded to my computer is made available in the Collection view of Microsoft Photos.

I like that I can create albums from the Collection. The duration, text adding, title card, themes, and background music customizations in the slideshow generator are great. If I need to edit a photo, I can do so in the main Album view (outside of the slideshow Video Editor) and replace it in my slideshow without too much back and forth fuss.

If I'm nitpicking, I would say I'm disappointed that the image editing mode doesn't let me draw over the image like Paint 3D allows. But my main problems are two-fold:

The slideshow view randomizes a selection of photos from the album that the software decided were most representative of the whole album (i.e. not all photos from the album are included in the slideshow); and
The slideshow view crops the edges of some photos (sometimes drastically), removing vital parts of what made the photo complete and album-worthy in the first place.

I found a couple of workarounds on a forum thread for item 1 above.

For item 2, I would have to manually resize each cropped photo to be in the 16:9 ratio. Ugh. Why can't it auto detect and shrink to fit? The options are to set all of the program's selection of photos to Landscape (16:9 or 4:3) or Portrait (9:16 or 3:4).

View of album in Microsoft Photos with orientation options shown

The rabbit hole required to make this software work for me became too much. So I tried some of its affiliates, accessible from the more options menu.

...Sway

Within the Microsoft Photos Album of your choice, click the Share icon in the upper right-hand corner to see two options appear: 1. Upload and share content, or 2. Create a Sway.

Sway is an in-browser editor that lets you add lots of caption and has text tools. It even lets you add heading and text slides by clicking the green circle with a white plus sign below the slide your cursor is hovering over (see below).

Trouble is, in the slideshow view, you have to manually click next for each slide and some images will be dramatically cropped. There is an option to override what Sway assumes is the focal point of an image by clicking the "The entire image is important" box on each image affected by the unnecessary cropping, but it's a pain to go through every image and select that box.

So I did for all 130 photos. I don't think I can emphasize enough how much I wish slideshow generators would STOP cropping my images.

Furthermore, the free version of Sway that comes with a Microsoft account has certain limits:

Headings	20
Paragraphs	150
Images	150
Videos	10
Audio	10
Embeds	10

I could only compile 150 images, per the limit. In order to create a Sway slideshow with more than 150 images, I'd need to purchase Microsoft 365.

When in the preview mode (by clicking Play), note that you can only exit the slideshow preview by pressing ESC on your keyboard.

5. Google Slides

The main reason I overlooked this software for image/video collections is because I would have to manually upload every image individually onto the slides. Now, considering the chaos I went through with the other slideshow generators, maybe that would be faster. Originally, it seemed too slow of a process to try. I may revisit this option, having a familiarity with this program already. My only other concerns are how to add music and if my Google Drive has enough memory to hold the number of photos I need to upload. I'm using 8 GB out the 15 GB allotted for free. I could create a new email, but that seems unnecessary. I could pay for extra storage space, but it would only be for this project. Paying a monthly subscription for one set of photos seems silly.

There is a Photo Album template you can use...

...but it still requires you to manually insert/upload every photo. If I were working with a small collection of photos, that wouldn't be so bad. I have used Google Slides for funeral presentations and so much more, but it simply wasn't designed for organizing and intuitively displaying large photo collections.

6. CyberLink PowerDirector 365 (Free Launch)

I'm trying the Free Launch version of this software. A monthly subscription ranges (without promotional discounts) from $19.99 - $34.99, and an annual subscription is $69.99 - $149.99 -- depending on the product you're using. See their price comparison page for more details.

At first glance, the slideshow feature in this software was too complicated for my purposes. However, after striking out or becoming frustrated with so many others, I decided to revisit it. Only problem was I couldn't seem to get started from the initial list of options.

Screenshot of startup window

None of these options were what I'm here for. Should I just click one and try to navigate from there?

ANSWER: No. If you want the general editor that gives you access to all of the Popular Templates listed and more, click "Timeline Video Editor". Don't let its name fool you into thinking it just uses your social media feed or is somehow specific to any social media.

Moving on to creating a video/slideshow of my next photo set, I was surprised to find it fairly straight-forward. I selected the Import Media icon and selected a folder from my hard drive with a preassembled collection of photos about a museum.

Then, after some experimentation, I highlighted all of the photos from that folder now appearing in the Media panel and clicked this lovely button:

With a few easy clicks, it has created me a simple slideshow of my photos, each displayed for five seconds, without cropping their edges or manipulating the order. Hallelujah! Now, I can overlay music, text, and transitions if I wanted to. Adding these features requires a bit of a learning curve, but at least you have the options to customize them. There are several effects and templates to choose from, IF you know which "room" to go to in the left vertical panel of icons.

Hit a snag: my photos stopped appearing in the preview upon playback. I have sound but no picture. Title card animation appears as desired. The one photo I have text animation on also appears normal. But the rest of my slideshow is black. Support posts on the topic suggest it to be a resolution issue. But before I lower the resolution of my laptop screen to an absurdly low ratio, I try a simple Off-On again of the app since it had been sitting all night. I closed and reopened the app, loaded my saved project, and sure enough, it started working correctly again. Weird.

Here is my slideshow ready to be compiled:

Because I used subscriber exclusive effects in the production of my slideshow, I will have to purchase a membership in order to download it for sharing. Given the features and control this program offers, I am going to continue using it for my other slideshows. Although I wish there was a button that let you restart your preview from the beginning, rather than having to manually relocate your red playback line, that you could preview an animation template before adding it to your timeline, and that there was a little more intuitiveness to how features are organized in the rooms, it can at least accomplish what I need with relative ease.

PhotoDirector 365 has an actual slideshow creator plug in. Look!

It maintains your photo order, image size, orientation, and has lovely transitions. You can add background music that will sync its down beats to your photos. The only downsides are that I can't add or overlay text easily and it won't play video clips. So if you want a basic slideshow of your photo collection without text, this is a great option. In order to play video and photos, and add text, I will need to use the Video Editor.

On the second run thru, I customized my interface and learned how to use the Subtitle Room for adding and customizing captions for each of my photos. Once I got the hang of what it was capable of, it went fairly swift. I'm definitely sticking with this one and glad I purchased it.

Got to say, I love the color match dropper to a color in the photo itself. I'm able to blend the caption into the photo. The active Position box in the image above lets you relocate the caption text box on the page according to an X and Y axis. It sounds harder than it actually is. X position controls where your subtitle is left to right on the image, while Y position controls where it is on the vertical axis. There is also an option in the 'T' to align the subtitle to the left, center, or right of the text box. Once you know those possibilities, you can put your text anywhere.

7. Adobe Lightroom Classic (7-day Trial)

This is a monthly ($9.99/mo. as part of the Creative Cloud Photography Plan, discounts available) or annual ($119.88/yr) subscription-based software designed primarily for photographers.

Any slideshow feature it could purport is limited. Added text will bleed beyond the image display and can be difficult to resize in order to fit the slide. There are no text tools I can find. There are no templates or music options to choose from in the slideshow view. Thankfully, it does allow Sort by name and in reverse order.

I didn't get far enough before my trial expired to save and share a completed slideshow project. Besides, it clearly didn't have enough features for a custom slideshow to fit my needs. I moved on to other possibilities.

NOTE: Classic has the Slideshow Module. Lr standard does not.

8. Adobe Photoshop Elements (30-day Trial)

I was optimistic about this software because:

I'd heard good things about it,
several people I know have used it,
Adobe is known for quality products and customer service, and
the features and user-friendliness seemed to be what I was looking for.

Using the 30-day trial ($99.99 one-time purchase for indefinite use), I explored APE's features and abilities that ticked my boxes:

It let me sort my collection by name.
It let me create albums of selected photos from the collection.
It let me customize those albums and create them into several different things, specifically a slideshow.
It let me customize some aspects of the slideshow, including text, photo order, template style, and music selection.
It came with its own built-in photo editor.

Little did I know this would turn into a week-long nightmare of issues.

With that said, thank you to their customer service rep, Rohit, for helping me realize the reason my left side bar and Back button in the Slideshow Preview wasn't working. Turns out the software doesn't respond well to touch. I use a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (w/ keyboard attachment), which is touch capable, so I use a stylus most of the time. Unfortunately, APE doesn't always recognize the commands of a stylus device. So I switched to using the mouse pad on my keyboard (and rewiring my brain). That at least cleared up why the program wasn't functioning. However, for a software used by professional artists, I'm surprised it is not touch compatible.

Even after that realization, the slideshow required a lot of little, tedious fixes to make presentable. Namely, the resizing (zooming) and cropping of photos required me to manually edit those by extending their canvas sizes and cropping down to the programs preferred standard of 16:9 inch ratio, then re-uploading and replacing the old image in my album, then regenerating the Slideshow Preview.

Furthermore, the music selections are not synced with the slides and cannot be customized in any easy way, resulting in sudden transitions of the tune mid-slide.

The template decides how many images appear grouped on a single slide and the only way to change that (say when you get the end of one museum appearing with the beginning of another museum in the same frame) is to reorder the images in the Media panel, regenerate the preview, and see if that worked or if it just caused a different problem.

Every time I leave the Preview mode to change something about the album in the Organizer view, the captions are turned off upon automatic regeneration of the Preview when I return; even though I saved the Preview as it was before leaving it. It requires I go into the Media panel and click "Add Captions" and regenerate the Preview again every time I go to a different window. It doesn't retain my settings.

Confusingly, there is a place in the Organizer's Information panel under General for "Captions" that has NOTHING to do with the "Captions" in the Slideshow Preview Media panel. So after pointlessly adding in my text to each photo's info in the Organizer, I later had to cut/paste each one into a separate Word document so I could copy/paste those into the Caption boxes of each of the photos in the Media panel of the Preview to get them to appear. Tedious! If there was a way to carryover those captions from the metadata, I didn't find it. (Saving the metadata to the images didn't solve it.)

The caption boxes in the Organizer Information panel do NOT have a character limit, while the caption boxes in the Review Media panel DO. This character limit thus required me to either make careful word choices or manually create text slides and insert those into the album. What I did was printscreen a blank slide in the template style, crop it to the 16:9 ratio in the photo Editor, then input the text block I wanted.

Screen shot of blank slide with added text

As a side complaint, the photo Editor would still prompt me with a popup Save box when trying to close the window even after I already manually saved the edits I made. This initially resulted in three versions of my image: the original, the one I manually saved, and the one the popup saved. Once I realized what was happening, I decided to stop manually saving and instead rely on the popup upon an attempt to close. So much trial and error, which I expect with any new program I experiment with, but a lot of this was just complicated design.

When all was said and done and I felt satisfied enough with the product, it was time to export. Exporting to my computer drive took at least half an hour. And the slideshow compromised on the overall photo quality. I was hopeful that the final rendition would maintain the original quality of the photos, despite the blurriness it showed in the Preview mode. Nope. It is still blurry photo galore. Sigh. Well, at least I have one of six slideshows done. [Note: I divided my photos/videos into six distinct groups of about 120 items each to make it easier on the generators. I stand by this division, as it will help my collection be more digestible to viewers.]

Overall, my experience with this software can be summarized by one phrase in my notebook: "Little annoyances."

9. AVS4You

My sister in England (an artist) recommended this product after hearing my struggles. The purchase price is a one-time cost of $80 USD.

AVS4You is a package of products:

Programs in the AVS4You folder download

Use the AVS Video Editor for creating a slideshow. Here is its interface:

Layering includes: duration and placement of transitions, types of transitions, music clip choice and duration, duration to linger on displaying each photo, duration of text on screen, and more. In other words, it treats the slideshow like a video rather than a photo collection in a video template, similarly to how PhotoDirector 365 functions.

In fact, AVS Video Editor resembles PhotoDirector 365 Timeline Editor in its layout, layered method of constructing a slideshow, and degree of customization. However, I generally found AVS to be more user-friendly. Its buttons are clearly labeled; timeline layers are designated for media, text, music, and voice recording; and there are fewer panels and features to contend with. I also like the Storyboard view.

Let's assess its functions against my needs:

Does it handle a large collection? Yes
Does it allow sorting by media name? Yes
Does it include all selected photos in order on the timeline? Yes, but orientation is wrong.
Does it have presets of music? Limited on the trial version
Can I add text to slides? Yes, but the presets for text are odd in that they don't seem to let you write in your own text within that style.
Can I customize that text? Yes
Can I add a text slide or title card? Yes
Can I download and share the project as an MP4? Yes, it has several options for download.

Unfortunately, as soon as I uploaded a set of photos, I noticed many were appearing sideways. This issue occurred with another software and the cause was that the photos were taken that way by holding your phone sideways or upside down. While some slideshow generators account for this and show your media upright as oriented in the hard drive folder, others do not. This is annoying to encounter again here on a similar platform as PhotoDirector 365. If I can't find a way to make the AVS software reorient the affected photos, this video editor is a bust for me.

I was unable to find a way to reorient, and the deeper I went, the more I realized PhotoDirector 365 is the better of the two. So I'm returning to that software.

Final Choices Used to Create Slideshows

My trip collection is divided into seven separate slideshows:

No. 1 is assembled using Adobe Photoshop Elements. It is a satisfactory introduction to my collection that includes all the photos I wanted, but was tedious and frustrating to create.

No. 5 is assembled using Microsoft Photos and Sway. The slideshow design requires the viewer to click the next arrow for each slide (">"), which is okay for a museum collection because it has informational, story-dense images. There is no music to set a mood. But it had one of the best caption/text editing capabilities (in the Storyline view) of all the slideshow generators I reviewed. Sway allows the viewer to move through the collection at their own pace and absorb the information or not.

Nos. 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 are assembled using PowerDirector 365. This generator is ideal for travel/event collections where you want to present photos and videos with text and background music. I liked the customization options and the miniature templates for text animation, title cards, and music. This software accomplished all of my goals, but requires some experimentation and tutorial to get familiar with. Some feature locations are not where you would expect them to be, but at least they are there. It can handle large collections of photos AND videos. It has presets for transitions, text overlay, animated text slides, and more. I also like that it has some common sense adjustments available, like moving where your text is centered on the slide, deciding what order to display your media in before adding them to your slideshow timeline, snapping new segments into place on the timeline, and auto-fitting your photos to the slideshow window! No destructive cropping, no annoying reordering, no unnecessary assumptions made.

Overall, some of the slideshow generators out there are best for small batches of photos to be displayed in random order. If you're trying to showcase highlights from a single event, most of these will work well for you. If you're trying to create a presentation with a lot of added text and the photos are only half of the focus, Google Slides or Sway will work well, but none of the others are likely to. If you're wanting mostly photo editing, Adobe Lr could work, but I wouldn't recommend its slideshow generator for anything other than showing a batch of photos quietly in the order you want, with no added text.

AVS Video Editor has a user-friendly interface, but it doesn't reorient photos to be upright as shown in the hard drive folder. Because of that fact, I couldn't complete a slideshow with it. PowerDirector 365 is the next step up, in terms of complexity, and actually has the features I absolutely need. For these reasons, I ultimately chose PowerDirector 365 for my long, complicated slideshows of photos, text, and videos.

VERDICT: PowerDirector 365

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This is an independent review, not sponsored or paid for by any product company.

Wandering Parent

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Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Slideshow Generators in Review (One Independent Source)