I have just discovered slide.com. With a slide.com account you can

After a slide show is created you can edit it, remove pictures and re-arrange them by dragging them into the order that you want.

After you’ve created and saved the slide show – slide.com gives you an embed code that you can copy and paste into your blog.

Make sure your text editor in your blog is set to HTML tab and not the visual tab, and paste the code in where you want the slide show.

My initial slide show looked like this:

If you don’t want all of the tabs under your slide show, you need to alter the embed code slightly.

The slide show code itself is inbetween <object></object> tags. Look at the code, highlight everything that comes after the closing </object> tag and before the final closing </p> tag, and delete it.

It won’t get rid of the review and star links at the top of the slide show, but it will remove all the black buttons under the slide show.

One thing about slide.com, is that it does not yet have a way to protect your images from having other people download them. My suggestion is to use this tool only on images that you don’t mind having people review and download. This is a social media slide show tool, and is meant for blog posts that invite discussion.

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Flickr slide shows are not the most elegant, but with the ability to add video, what a great addition this can be to your blog or website!

• on a travel site or real estate site, to show a montage of photographs and  videos of a featured location
• on a cooking site, to intersperse “how to” video and photos of the final products
• start a photo slide show with a video introduction.
• piece together a slide show of multiple videos – to create a full length tutorial or demo.

In three easy steps you can create a set of photos and videos on flickr, and then embed that set into your blog or web page.

1. Log into flickr, go to upload photos and videos (under the “You” menu in the top navigation). Upload your photos and videos. Make sure you have selected that anyone can see your photos.
2. Once your photos and videos are uploaded, click on the “Organize” link in the top navigation, and then click on “Sets and Collection”.  In the top left click on “Create a new set”, and drag your photos and videos from your photo stream at the bottom of the page onto your set. Your screen should look like this:
   

   Once you’ve dragged all the photos and videos into your set, hit the save link at the bottom of the left column to save your new set.

3. Click in the top right the link that says, “Your photostream” to return to your photos. In the right column you should see your sets. Click on the image representing the set that you want to share, and then click the “slide show” link in the top right. When the slide show loads, click the “Share” link in the top right. This will give you embed code to add it to your blog or website. Make sure you switch to the html view in your blog editor before pasting in the code.

I created a set of images of our puppy, and included a quick video that I shot this morning – just to test how it would work.

View my slide show of our miniature schnauzer, Rosco, below.

If you don’t want people to be able to download your flickr photos, when you log into flickr, in the top navigation under ‘You’, choose ‘Your account’ and then click on the ‘privacy and permissions’ tab. The first setting is “Who can download your pictures” and there is an ‘edit’ link to the far right of it. Click on that link to adjust the settings.

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If you don’t want people to be able to download your flickr photos, when you log into flickr, in the top navigation under ‘You’, choose ‘Your account’ and then click on the ‘privacy and permissions’ tab. The first setting is “Who can download your pictures” and there is an ‘edit’ link to the far right of it. Click on that link to adjust the settings.

What is your experience using flickr?

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I am always fired up when I learn about a new tool, and slideshowpro is really exciting. I immediately purchased it so that I could play with it.

I purchased the slideshowpro for flash ($39), and the CMS slideshowpro director ($39). My server will work with slideshowpro director, if any of my clients are interested, however, if you are going to be making tons of video slide shows, I recommend the slideshowpro hosting for the CMS, because you won’t have to worry about bandwidth, and it is really reasonable.

1. Step one in getting slideshowpro up and running on my wordpress blog was to install the director on my website server. This was pretty straight forward.  You ftp the files to the server, and then browse to them. The installation process through the web browser walks  you through any permissions that you need to update. It will prompt you to manually create a .xml file called crossdomain.xml, it will tell you exactly what to copy and paste into that file,  and upload that to your root directory, which I did with bbedit.
2. Step two was to create an album in the director and upload photos to it. I uploaded pictures from a walk I took on a landbank trail in Chilmark, just two days ago. I then copied the path generated to that albums .xml file to paste into the flash file parameters.
3. Step three was to install the slideshowpro extension into my flash cs3 and then create a new flash file.
4. Step four was to plug in the path to the album’s .xml file generated by the album, and also to choose that the .xml file is a director generated file, publish the .swf file and ftp it to my server.
5. Step five was to install the plug-in Kimili flash embed tag generator into my wordpress blog, and click on its icon to add the new .swf files path, size etc.   I made sure to add the base=”.” parameter to the embed tag. I found the instructions here.
6. The results of my efforts are at the top of the page.

I am pretty excited to learn more about the slideshowpro customization and parameters.

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