The Ultimate Guide To Memorable Travel Slideshows

These are great tips. It gives me a great idea as to how I can spend weeks….even months…upon my return home (thus avoiding the resumption of a career)!

Hey Dave — that’s pretty much how I spent 2-3 weeks after my last trip; collecting all the photos/videos and creating a slideshow dvd. sure it was a lot of work, but it helped keep the trip alive while I merged back into “real life” again.

I’ve got so many photos right now I have no idea what to do with them all!

I managed to put together a slide show from my China leg….but after I did that I didn’t have time left.

A good sound track always makes a difference.

Very nice article….I shall use it…if I ever get round to sorting out my photos!

I wonder how did you make slideshow movies? I am trying to find out such freeware for a while but can’t find it. Your Thailand trip movie on YouTube is brilliant.

Hi TJ – I created the films with a cheap video editing program called Roxio Videowave ($50). Since then I’ve moved on to a higher end Adobe suite, but Roxio was easily good enough for the Thailand film. If you’re looking for freeware, you could probably get away with Windows Move Maker which should be on your comp already, if you’re on Windows.

This is a really good post. I am going to Peru, in 2 weeks, and i never thought about creating a sideshow. I just upload my photos to Flickr, and forget it. I will certainly try it.

@TJ
you might want to try http://picasa.google.com/. I haven’t tried building sideshows in it, but i am pretty sure you can embed videos.

P.S. Found the post via Lifehacker, this looks like something that belongs in my RSS feed.

[...] read more | digg story [...]

Great article! Travel slide shows are a bit of a hobby of mine… http://www.photoshow.com is a great site to use while you are on the road!

Ian,
Which program in adobe suit you can use for creating slideshows? As far as my knowledge goes, you could make 24p project in Adobe premiere pro 2.0 to create slideshows but pan and zoom is a royal pain in the neck. On the top of that 24p projects is a good idea for NTSC lads but we PAlites can not use this so easily..

I had a look at Chad’s comment on photoshow and it looks really good. I am downloading trial version to play around with.

@Pasha,
Not too sure if Picasa can make video slideshows? It is a new upgrade. I installed and uninstalled twice, it didn’t stand upto my taste..

The easiest slideshow app to use is Photoshop Elements. Free 30-day download. Very easy and results will blow you away.

@ TJ – I actually found Adobe Premiere Pro fairly easy to do pans and zooms, but the amount of settings available to tweak can get out of hand for newbies. That’s why I recommend something like Roxio for simplicity’s sake. It also has a fairly easy slideshow feature, along with dvd menu creation and burning.

Well, nice tips for a slideshow. I think that most of us know a situation when you have too much photo for your show to be interesting.

[...] you show it to your church? Will you put it up on your ministry’s website? I came across this great guide to memorable travel slideshows. It is written for general travel slide shows, but you could use it in your ministry, too. [...]

Great tips, thanks so much! I’m going to Europe this summer so this is a very useful list.
Yeah, as far as I know Roxio is good, but it is SO SO SO much easier to just do the whole thing on a Mac. Easier, more beautiful, and (after the computer) free. Thanks again Ian.

We take a slightly different, approach using some of those ideas on our online travel journals:
http://www.mainething.com/AuNz07/
http://www.mainething.com/samerica06/
http://www.mainething.com/hawaii/

Thanks
David

Good article. I have been making slide shows for many years and with new software available it has become easier and faster. For Windows the best free program is Photo Story 3 (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx).

When using Ken Burns effects (zooming and panning) I found the flickering of lines that are slightly off of horizontal and vertical lines quite anoying (particularly at higher definitions). I found only one program that handles this problem well – ProShow Gold (http://www.photodex.com/products/proshowgold/) -at about $70 it comes with DVD authoring as well as burning programs. Both Windows programs give you fully automatic or manual control of Ken Burns effects (just import pictures and music and you are done – then you can tweak , if you want, presentation to your liking).

I also have a MacBook Pro (which I love, and prefer over PC for many applications) and I agree with kt that it is easy to make slide shows with iLife, but no matter how hard I tried their quality is much worse then the ones I can get with Windows programs.

Lastly, one WIndows program worth of checking out is MemoriesOnTV (http://www.codejam.com/). This program, as well as ProShow Gold come with free trials.

Another idea is to put together a professional looking, hard bound, coffee table type of album (such as a Photobook) and have your guests discover it as it sits on the living room table. They will ask questions.

Combining photography with travel, in my case done on a Vespa scooter, is a wonderful activity and I do it a lot for my blog Scooter in the Sticks. The advice here is exceptional and I look forward to going through more of your content.

I might offer some disagreement about narration though. I agree that for most people narration creates more problems than it solves. But for the exceptional storyteller with the right images narration either recorded or spoken can yield an amazing performance.

The challenge is figuring out whether one is an exceptional story teller or not.

Steve Williams

Some great tips. I think the most important one is the photo selection tip. With digital picture there are so many yet it’s important to trip the amount to avoid making the slideshow boring.

Another point to consider is the photo/video sequence. Usually I sort photos by location but sometimes the first part of the trip isn’t necessarily the most interesting part. I think that for the sake of generating interest especially at the beginning the show the photos can avoid following the chronological sequence of locations as visited during the holiday. This also applies when sorting photos for a particular location in the slideshow.

Looking forward for more content.

Hey everyone, thanks for all the feedback on the article. Some great follow up tips were shared. One thing seemed to be contentious though, and that was the “don’t narrate” tip, which I feel I should clarify.

First of all, if you’re doing a slideshow where you actually advance the photos yourself, with no music in the background, etc, then BY ALL MEANS narrate away. This is really more of your story with an accompanying slideshow to back you up.

In my case above, I’m talking about a fully automated film/slideshow that runs on it’s own. In this case, narrating the slideshow would mean you’re talking “over” the presentation, which is distracting, or you’d have to stop the show, which breaks the magic.

So hopefully that makes sense.

Total agree with you. Ian! I’ve been bored by too many photos that are not edited or organized before sending out to friends. I usually use free tool such as Picasa to edit my photos, trying to show people the most important part. I don’t care if the photos are original or not. I am not a professional photographer after all.

Nice tips. Thanks.

Another comment on “narrating…” The use of captions or title slides may be helpful if there are things you’d like to point out. For example, I just did a presentation for our church that highlighted many of our summer activities. Adding titles to the first slide of each section helped people understand where we were in the show.

Rather than creating a “blank” title slide, I pick a slide from the event or trip and add the title to it. This helps the show move along.

Note — when doing this, avoid “busy” slides, and consider raising the brightness and lowering the contrast of the photo before adding the title.

Great post… definitely was inspirational to us recently. We’ve been trying to build a tool that would help travelers build stunning slideshows in about a minute.

This seems to be a common problem for many travellers. If you have the time and skill, you can use tools like iMovie but it’s definitely not easy to get it right.

We just launched our slideshow creator made just for trips (with integrated trip routes and all).

Give it a shot and let us know what you think.
tripwow.tripadvisor.com/tripwow

Thanks to BNT for this great article!

I wish some friends we met over the weekend had read this. They had been on safari and I thought they were joking when they fired up the laptop. Definitely didn’t read the ‘keep it short’, ‘mix scenery’ (or even don’t show them 10 versions of almost exactly the same photo) or don’t narrate it. I will send them to your article once the dust settles !

[...] The Ultimate Guide To Memorable Travel Slideshows | Matador .Mar 27, 2007 This comprehensive guide will show you how to craft memorable travel slideshows that will have your [...]