[ale] NewbieQ on OO/Impress for photo slide shows

[John Mills]

Aaron -

Thanks for the suggestions. I sure didn't realize I would be 'pushing the 
performance envelope' with this project! I thought I was taking the easy 
way out.

On Thu, 4 Dec 2008, aaron wrote:

> A few thoughts to add to robert's....

> Depending on how "gee wiz" you want the transitions between slides
> to be, OOo Impress may not be the best approach (other suggestions
> below).

No problem for me - simple is fine for this.

>>> What is a good image size/resolution for JPEG slides to be viewed
>>> on computer display...?

> What Robert said, with the note that the most likely projector resolution
> will also be 1024x768, which is about 25% better than the standard video
> resolution which most projectors also support.

I'll try making up a sub-set in that size and see how much it helps. Maybe 
"close is good enough" if I save on file size and the display tool deals 
with screen use. (BTW, has anyone else tried the built-in slideshow in M$ 
Vista with a wide-format display? Major boo-boo, Mr. Gates! I don't 
understand why they even released it in that shape.)

> Also, not sure of the batch export options with Impress since I haven't
> used it much, but it may be possible to organize the images there then
> export them (in the size reduced format?) with numeric file names in the
> correct order.

I had been using the 'album' Perl script from 'marginal-hacks', but it 
does require renaming the files to control the order. It also requires - 
at least for me - a lot of hand-work separating and re-combining photos 
that have different aspect ratios (width:height) to get the thumbnails 
right. There's supposed to be an 'add to existing album' feature but I 
haven't found it to work for this.

I just downloaded a copy of the 'dvd-slideshow' tools and will probably 
give them a whirl.

> Not a Linux solution, but if you can get your files to a Mac with iDVD, the
> program has a facility for automatically making a video slide show that can
> even be automatically timed to an audio track.  You can have it save the
> original, full quality images on the disk in addition to the video DVD
> slide show, so it makes a hybrid Video / DATA DVD.  I believe the companion
> iPhoto integrates so that you could use it to organize the slide show order.

> As noted above, of you can get to a Mac with iDVD...

Well, I earlier used the phrase 'hardware challenged'. It's a near-synonym 
for 'budgetarily challenged.' I do have Photoshop Elements6 and should 
look into the docs to see what it offers for presentation.

Cheers - hang onto your sanities through the upcoming holiday season[s].

  - Mills