Today I felt like putting together an online portfolio of my latest fashion work. So how do I go about that? The idea of a slideshow came to mind. I was curious to find out what I could do with slideshows from flickr and see if there’s a better way yet. After all I want this puppy to do a bunch of things for me:

• Smooth reliable playback! It just needs to work and look good, or it’ll do no good for me.
• Embed code! After all I’ll want this to be posted in as many places as possible.
• Linkage! I’d like to link back to my website, when someone clicks on an image or the player.
• Updates! I might just want to add images, even though the slideshow is out and playing on various sites.

So I started with my flickr account, created an album, added my latest fashion images and defined the running order. Pretty easy, takes a few minutes. Hit the slideshow button, pick up the embed code and here we go:

Looks pretty good. Even has some navigation. But it only links back to my flickr account and no way to have it link to my site, which I’d much prefer! And sadly there is no embed code to be obtained externally, so no one else can host it on their site, blog, facebook, etc. There’s only a regular link, which won’t launch the slideshow player.

On the plus side however, I can update the album on my flickr account and the changes will filter back to all the places where this is published. Very cool!

Next up was slideroll.com, which also allows you to draw from your flickr account - or upload manually if you don’t have one. It was fairly easy to drag & drop from my previously created flickr album and create the slideshow in a web 2.0 type interface, which includes a timeline to organize the photos in. Here it goes:

Make a Free Flash Slideshow

Now the YouTube Version can be picked up and embedded elsewhere by anybody. But quality is poor and again no linkage to my main site. Plus the whole process of creating and then rendering out a movie file to then be uploaded to YouTube is a little cumbersome.

I found a few more slide making applications and services, all of which seem to do the same or less than the few options outlined above. Any of you have a link or idea to share on how to make the perfect online slideshow? Hit me in the comments with your suggestions!!!

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