Mac Slideshow Programs?

I built a quick slideshow in Photos, of my shots from one hockey game, just to get feedback on it. The team manager and coaches went nuts for it.

I've now built two of the things using Photos, and I can now say that despite the good results (I wind up with a very polished slideshow), I'd like to try a slightly more advanced program. I do have the full Adobe CC suite, but After Effects and Premiere are a bit intimidating at this point.

What I don't like about Photos is that the templates are so limited. And, I would like to be able to randomize the photographs on import, and then just move a few around manually after the fact. Not being able to randomize them on import, I'm moving a lot around manually. I would like to be able to crank these things out quickly, as I'd like to do one for every game and practice I shoot.

I've tried Lightroom, and what I'm getting is not very polished. I haven't tried Photoshop. I have tested the iSkysoft Slideshow Maker, but I don't like the included templates, and the end result is not as polished as with Photos.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a program? Cheap or free is good.

Proshow Gold - not free. Very good - can randomise the entire show or just a selected section.
Can apply transitions and timings to whole show or just a selected section of it.
Has a lot of styles and options.
Includes some royalty free music.
I also have Vegas Movie Studio (Platinum) but I'm finding I go to Proshow Gold much more often

This website has it for $30/year
I bought the perpetual licence version (I'm on PC)

http://www.photodex.co​m/proshowformac/eid939​9/

Thanks, AceCo55. I'm trying the web based function of Proshow. I really like that it appears to have a pile of music one can use.

I do have a PC desktop, and a Windows virtual machine on my Mac, so I'm going to test the downloadable software package on those.

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neacail wrote in post #17876382
I built a quick slideshow in Photos,.......

What I don't like about Photos is that the templates are so limited. And, I would like to be able to randomize the photographs on import, and then just move a few around manually after the fact. Not being able to randomize them on import, I'm moving a lot around manually. I would like to be able to crank these things out quickly, as I'd like to do one for every game and practice I shoot.

I feel your pain.

Photos is indeed very limited when it comes to being able to very quickly build quality customizable slideshows.

Believe it or not, you may already have the best slideshow software I have ever used - iPhoto

Yup, the one thing that iPhoto did way, way better than Photos was to create custom slideshows. It allowed for a lot of customization, and the great thing was you could do all of that customization within, quite literally, a few seconds! Really, it was that quick. Want to play a slideshow, and set properties such as what music will play, how long each photo will view for, what transitions are in between photos, and whether to view in random order or set order, - doing all of that would take literally 5 to 10 seconds. It was so simple, yet did so much.

It boggles my mind why Apple's new program, Photos, offers less customization, yet does so with a much more cumbersome, time-consuming user interface. Perplexing, really.

If you have an older computer with iPhoto, give it a try - I think you will be pleasantly surprised.


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Thanks for drawing my attention back to this thread!

I tried ProShow, and it is awesome. But, I like the most expensive version as I want 1080P. Purchasing it is on my wishlist.

I also tried Corel Video Studio. I have an older version on my PC workstation. I liked it quite a bit. It is easier than Premiere and it has a bunch of nice templates that can be downloaded as free add-ons. It was a bit more work than I really wanted, as I had six slideshows to create.

I also tried iPhoto, and Aperture (my MacBook is a mid-2014 . . . so I still have iPhoto and I had purchased Aperture). They weren't quite what I was looking for. I had troubles getting the photos ordered according to my new filenames (explanation further down in this reply). They're both better than Photos, though.

As an aside . . . Aperture's facial recognition no longer works properly on my computer since upgrading to El Capitan.

In the end, I produced my slideshows with iMovie. I found that it had some decent templates, and it was pretty easily configurable. It was also reasonably intuitive. It took me around three hours to set up my first slideshow, but I built the next five off of the first one . . . and they only took me around a 1/2 hour a piece. iMovie has some nice titles templates: for the beginning, middle, and end of the slideshow.

Something that I did do, which made things much easier for me, was using a Terminal command to randomly rename the images I wanted to use in the slideshow.

In Terminal, I navigated to the folder that I had copied the slideshow jpegs into. I then entered the following command in the Terminal window:

for i in *.jpg; do mv $i $RANDOM.jpg; done

It gave the files new numerical filenames, in a completely random order. I was a then able to bring the photos into iMovie, sort them according to filename, and then have my images randomly ordered in the slideshow.

billylovessmores wrote in post #18309765
RendrFX has an amazing slideshow maker! Just upload your photos into their templates and you're set. Check them out here - http://www.rendrfx.com​/slideshow-maker-with-music

$49 a month..No thanks.. I will stick with Proshow..