Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Slideshow How-to

(Please Remember: on Thursday, post your slideshow on your blog, and bring in your mp3 and jpg folders. We’ll hand those over to the Flash class.)

You’ll need the following ingredients to create an audio slideshow using Soundslides nad post it on your blog:

The Soundslides program (available for free from Soundslides.com).
A folder containing jpg photos.
An mp3 audio file.
An account with Webng (available for free from Webng.com).
A bit of patience.


Getting started:
Open Soundslides.
Ignore the Registration page by clicking Later.
Select NEW Create a project.
Give your project a name and give the computer a place to save it.

You’ll come to a page that asks you to load your jpg folder and mp3.
First, select an Output size on the left. Try “small” because you’re putting it on a blog.

Now load your jpg folder.
Then load your mp3.

You can change the order of your photos, and change the amount of time they stay on-screen.

You cannot alter the mp3 file once it’s loaded.

To change the order of your photos, drag and drop them where you want them. If that doesn’t work – it didn’t work well for me – you can specify the time at which they appear. This is done in the Slide Info tab.

You can adjust the length of time a photo stays on-screen by clicking the side of a photo in the timeline and sliding it left or right.

When you’re happy with your audio slideshow, click export.
This creates a folder called publish_to_web.

You must highlight all of the items in the folder and create a zip file of them – go to File, and select Create Archive. You will need the zip file when you upload the slideshow to the Web, so find out where it resides (I had trouble finding mine).

In WebNG, use File Manager and create a new directory. Open that directory, then upload your zip filed.

Unzip.
Allow it to overwrite files.
Delete the Archive zip file in the directory.

Click Current URL to view the soundslide.

Copy the URL and paste it into:
www4.soundslides.com/apps/utilities/

This generates an embed code that you can place in your blog.

You can modify the width and height of your slideshow at this point. If you change them, click Modify. That generates a new embed code.

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