Introducing Soundslides

We already used Slide and Photopeach. As you have seen - these service are pretty simple and easy to use. All you need is a bunch of pictures and a stable internet-connection. But there are quite a lot of limitations. We talked about these as well. The biggest one: You can not work on the transitions. We are going to change that now. With yet again another tool. It is called Soundslides.

Soundslides is a slide show authoring program that was created by former photojournalist Joe Weiss in 2005. The application took the journalism industry by storm and quickly rose to become an industry standard for audio slide show authoring. Soundslides is a desktop application, which means you have to download it on to your computer. It's available for both Mac and PC and comes in two versions: a basic version which runs $39.95 and a pro version that costs $69.95. The trial and full versions of SoundSlides can be purchased and downloaded for free at Soundslides.

Some of the benefits of Soundslides include:

An incredibly simple-to-use interface
Very small learning curve, most of it is drag-and-drop
Outputs files in Adobe Flash format, a very common Web format that works cross platform
It was built for journalists

Some of the drawbacks of Soundslides :

No video integration
Runs a dynamic slide show from a folder of files, so it only works on the Web

Storys can be told with pictures, music, background noises, a narrator or interviewees talking. Think carefully about your concept of Storytelling! An read this article about it.

More useful Links:

Here you can find a Step-by-Step Video-Tutorial

RGMP 10: Learn to use Soundslides

Embedding your slide show in WordPress

Great Example from the New York Times: 1 in 8 Million. (I Like 'The Walker' very much!)

Another Example from the New York Times: On the Streets (Snow!)

The Atlantic: A tour of Japan's mountain baths and hot springs.

More great Multimedia-Stuff can be found here