PhotoPresenter Editor's Review

PhotoPresenter is an easy-to-use and powerful slideshow viewer.

PhotoPresenter is what I would call "cool" slideshow viewer. It can play videos and photos in slideshows, nothing unusual here. But the way it does it: with great style.

There are 2 types of slideshow. Standard and animated. In 'standard' mode you get to chose between 2 transitions with 'slow-fast' option. The standard mode includes 'play music', 'fit slideshow to music', 'repeat', ' shuffle slide order', ' show titles' and 'play each slide for 1 to 60 seconds'. You can chose the song you want to hear during the slideshow.

Now the "award-winning" famous animated slideshow. There are cool 3D styles for slideshows. Every style has a 6 photo preview. There are styles which you are used to such as "cover flow" or "apple tv intro" and 27 more. Each style is full 3D and nice to look at for hours. PhotoPresenter takes slideshows to a new level of style. As a downside to all the 3D effects, your computer will run a little slower. If in your slideshow you find a video, the music from iTunes or PhotoPresenter will fade out and let the video play until it ends, than continue.

If you want to customize the style effects, you have the "inspector" button to help you choose 'favorite transitions', display 'title' and 'slide duration'.

All the application slideshows modes, can be customized and launched also by keyboard shortcuts. Even more if you like to relax while viewing your photos, you can control the application using the Apple-remote .

PhotoPresenter is integrated with all iApps, is recognizes iPhoto and Aperture libraries, and can play any song in iTunes. You can also use multiple displays without any problem, the software will adapt itself and treat all monitors as a single large one.

Since I have seen these kind of effects in screensavers, PhotoPresenter gives the possibility to export animated slideshow as one. If you fell that you can do more with your imagination, the producer gives you a tutorial on how to use Quartz to create slideshow effects.

I played with this software for a few hours, during all this time I encountered 2 errors, one when I wanted to play slideshow directly from iPhoto Library, and the other while I was changing some settings.

Pluses: great 3D effects photo transitions, lots of features.

Drawbacks / flaws: on slower Macs, some styles might not work fluently. It still needs a little work to prevent errors.

In conclusion: PhotoPresenter surely deserves its awards in design. Excellent slideshow effects and lots of features.

version reviewed: 3.1