One of everyone’s favorite parts of our photo safaris is the participant slideshow on the last evening. Everyone gets to relive the trip – which always goes by too quickly – while looking at their images on the big screen for the first time. Each of us also gets to marvel at how many different ways there are to look at the same scene. Set to an appropriate sound track, with some professional-looking touches, the show is popular enough that we normally need to run it twice. Best of all, because it is pre-timed and self-running, it doesn’t bog down the way presentations can if a presenter narrates every image. I always get compliments about putting the show together, but at the risk of spoiling the magic, the secret is simple: Photodex ProShow. Whether you lead a group or simply want to chronicle a trip with friends or family, it is absolutely worth it to put together a show as a great finale.

Photodex ProShow Gold and ProShow Producer make vacation slideshows simple

I’ve used a lot of slideshow packages over the years, including the venerable Powerpoint of course, but none make it simpler to create a pro-grade slideshow that ProShow. If you really want to slack off, you can use its Wizard to do everything for you. Simply set an Energy level to dictate pacing and the software does the rest. However, you can easily take as much control as you want. You can choose from many pre-defined themes and templates, or create your own. Transitions are especially nice, as the software comes with a large library of them that look and work well. They really add a lot of value compared to flipping through slides from one to the next.

Captions are trivial to add, using either the built-in text styles or your own. The same for the sound track. There are choices of appropriate music or you can use your own audio files. Video clips can be added just as easily as photographs, and you can decide whether to use the audio recorded along with the video, or your soundtrack, or a mix of both.

Photodex ProShow makes it easy to put together a show with images from lots of people

One of the tricky bits of a participant slideshow is gathering all the images. With everyone using a different camera, and different software, it’s great that ProShow supports just about every format out there, and is fully color managed, so I don’t have to worry about the colorspace of the incoming images (using Producer). Similarly, when I show the final result, I can match it to the color of the output device. ProShow also lets you know which of the images in a folder have already been added to the show, so it’s easy to get images from people at different times, right up until show time. ProShow is also integrated with Lightroom, so you can snag your images directly from your image management software.

Lots of options for creation and display

The most powerful option for using ProShow is the native Windows application (either Gold or Producer), but you can also create excellent shows using ProShow Web from any web browser on your PC, Mac, or mobile device. For the final show, you can run it interactively as a Windows app (with Producer), or generate a video, USB stick, or DVD (with Producer or Gold). On our recent Africa trip, for example, we were having trouble getting the video output from my laptop to register on the big screen TV at the safari lodge. I was able to simply render the slideshow as a video on a USB stick which played perfectly.

Okay, so show us!

Below is the actual slideshow I put together the final afternoon of our recent Africa trip. I thought about putting some more work into it now that I’m back in the office with a bit more time and a lot more computing resources, but thought it might be more impressive to show you what was possible with only about an hour of work. (NOTE: I did need to shorten the YouTube version to avoid a copyright issue with part of the sound track)

We've also published this and some of our other favorite slideshows to our SmugMug Galleries

(if it doesn't show up, you may need to enable Flash):

If you browse around our online galleries you’ll find a number of other participant shows we’ve created over the years, from Africa, Alaska, Texas, and Southeast Asia. They all have the virtue that they were assembled in limited time using ProShow. You can learn more about ProShow from Photodex’s own site, as there is way more than I can cover here!