Sunday, February 26, 2012

Slide Show Poll

The poll about which slide show Blog readers prefer ended yesterday morning.  Eighteen people (thirty-three percent) prefer the fancy graphics of Smilebox's embedded slide show while thirty-six folks (sixty-six percent) prefer the clickable URL of Picasa's slide show software.

However, there are serious problems with both type of slide show.  The pretty graphics are very very slow loading and also cut off the top and bottom of my photos. Quite a few people were never able to access the clickable URL.  (I wonder if that's because they don't have some type of Google account but I don't know.)  The clickable URL shows off canvases in such detail that they could be copied, which worries some Blog readers.

In other words, neither option is great.  Why look for a slide show, then?  Why not post all the photos one by one in a blog article?  The reason I don't do that is because Blogger allows me to have 1024 MB of photos here.  I have used 51 percent of my allotted space in the five years Blog has been using Blogger.  Slide shows are a way of conserving space since they are hosted elsewhere.  I delete all the Canvas of the Day photos each week and also delete the thumbnail photos used in the header and in the right hand column when I change them.  I also use smaller photos of some blog entry photos when the larger size doesn't matter because it won't show much more detail than the smaller size.  I want to postpone deleting images from articles as long as possible.

I think the clickable URL slideshows are exceedingly dull and I don't like the fact that I had to download and install Smilebox's software which then opened a window every time I imported photos to my computer, asking if I wanted to create a slideshow from them.  This doesn't matter to Blog viewers, but it is important to folks who are also thinking about what slide show they want for their blog. So I'll keep looking.

If you know about any slideshows that work well for almost every computer user, that are free, and that play nice with Blogger, please let me know.


Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
and at http://chstitchguides.blogspot.com

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