I have a couple of mini-PC systems that I use to display images in a slide show. One of these systems displays these slides on a 4K monitor and I’ve recently gotten a more modern one for that purpose. Post for that is upcoming soon.
Using these systems to display images of 16:9 Aspect is no problem and most images captured by cameras and cellphones and screen shots from games are of this or approximately this aspect. I use Irfanview on Windows, and the built in image viewer on Linux.
However, showing slide shows of vertically aspect images is less than ideal. Too much of the screen is left black to be pleasing to the eye.
When a large number of images like these are presented, it would be better to be able to quickly make a slide show that shows more than one image at a time on the screen.
Looking for a Tool
My first thought was to look for a tool to do this automatically. Or perhaps semi automatically. But searches of photo slide show applications did not turn up anything interesting.
Upload my photos to a slide show website? Nope.
There is a recent plethora of photo slide show makers that ask you to upload your photos to their website. I don’t know about you, but I’m not really willing to do that. Who knows what their EULA says about their rights to your photos or what they are doing with them. I need a local tool to satisfy my privacy concerns.
Make a Movie From the Images? Too Slow and Too Big.
Many of these programs, or any of the common and affordable video editors, like Corel Video Studio, can be used to make slide shows from images. But rendering the movie takes forever, and is quite large, compared with the size of the images themselves.
Ken Burns Effect is too much work.
I’ve written a slide show program some time ago. Long before the “Ken Burns Effect” was a thing, my QtSlidePlayer program allowed you to make slide shows that can be used to make any such effect you like. However, this program requires that you spend time with each slide in the show to create the animations and it does not allow you to display more than one image at a time. You can zoom in on the top – for example – and then pan down the image to the bottom to fill the whole screen, but it’s time consuming to make these shows. My program does not render the final show as a movie, but just keeps a meta file with your images. The meta files work between Windows and Linux if, like me, you have both types of systems. But I don’t use this program much any more. It’s just too much work to make a slide show.
What about a Presentation Program?
I’m a long time user of Libre Office and have dabbled with Impress – the Power Point knockoff. I recall it has Animations for slide components.
So, yes you can use it to make a slide show and yes it can even incorporate the Ken Burns Effect if you like. But it’s quick to build shows if you don’t want that effect.
Use Impress to Build Slide Shows
I suggest the following to get started with Impress to build Slide Shows.
- Select a template, or make one, with a simple dark background, and remove all the text boxes and title boxes from the slide.
- Duplicate a few empty slides so you have some to work with and as you fill them up, duplicate more.
- Drag and drop images to the slides, and move them to the outside. You can resize, crop and arrange them front and back in any way you like. As you drop the images they are automatically sized to the height of the slide to save time.
- As I choose images for each slide, I choose images with similar color pallets and try to face any characters to the center of the screen rather than the outside. But these are just my preferences.
- Choose a slide transition such as wipe from side to side or anything else you like. Choose Advance Automatically for the time you like. Apply to all the slides.
- Change the slide show settings to loop the show.
- Save your show. This show contains the images so it’s pretty large, but not as big as a movie file and it saves much much faster than a movie renders.
- Play your show on any Windows or Linux system with Libre Office installed. Linux Mint that I use comes with Libre Office installed.
Enjoy and Stay Safe.
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