Today’s giveaway is Extra Photo Slide Show, which helps you put together photos and music to create video slideshows.
Installation and Registration
I don’t have a Vista machine to test it on, but installation ran smoothly for me. A big annoyance is that the installer changes the homepage of Internet Explorer to the software developer’s website, without asking you for permission. Registration of the program is done by clicking on a small icon to the right of the “Start” button and entering the serial number. The instructions didn’t provide a user name though, but the program accepted any name you enter.
Ease of Use
I didn’t have much trouble creating a simple slideshow. The absence of a help file was not really an issue (the “help” shortcut created in the start menu simply pointed to the developer’s website, on which I can’t find any documentation for this program)
Options on the first tab let you add photos and choose transitions and change timing options. A second tab lets you clip/ crop and add background music. The final tab lets you define the output options.
Adding photos was an easy task, although I wished there is a preview of the transition chosen. The window wasn’t resizable, and this did hinder my ability to view the filenames of my photos. Perhaps a thumbnail view would be a better option than the list view used.
I was a bit confused that nothing happened when I pressed the big Start button. Turns out that I need to press a second start button in the new window that appears in order for the creation process to start.
Features
With the description claiming a total of 142 transition effects, I was eager to try out some of them. I was, honestly speaking, disappointed that most were just variations (e.g. wipe left to right and right to left) of one another. I was also looking for more sophisticated effects but was left disappointed again. There were also some jerkiness in the rendered videos.
Format support is good, with all common picture and audio files supported:
| Picture | BMP, PNG, GIF , JPG, EMF, J2K, PCX, PNG, RAS, TGA, TIFF, WMF |
| Audio | WMA, MP3, WAV, ADPCM, PCM, GSM, OGG, Video files |
The program also allows to use the audio track from video files.
A simple tool allows you to add subtitles to individual photos. You can change the font, size, colour, transparency and location. You can’t however insert multi-line subtitles or add drop shadows.
The program also lets you clip /crop selected parts of audio files. Music files will automatically loop once they end. I tested an OGG file, and it worked without any problems.
You have the choice to create a wmv, avi, mpeg or rm video file. The presets, which include DVD-compatible files, should offer sufficient options for most. An option to burn a DVD directly would be an excellent feature though. I received a few errors that forced the program to exit during the rendering process.
Summary
Extra Photo Slide Show does well when it comes to its ease of use, but suffers slightly in the features department. I had hoped for smoother and more professional looking effects. Today’s giveaway wouldn’t be a bad option if all you want is to create a simple slideshow with background music.
Rating: 3/ 5
Free Alternatives
Picasa 3 – A photo organiser with a simple slideshow maker built-in. Transitional effects are nice, though limited.
Slide Show Movie Maker – Supports only wav files for audio, and not too user friendly. Transition effects appear smooth.
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