Professional live slideshows made easy

FotoMagico is a powerful but fun tool for allowing you to create professional slideshows from your photos and music in just a few mouse clicks.

FotoMagico has a very easy-to-use and slick interface, which enables high quality images to be arranged into stunning presentations. Once you’ve selected the photos you want to use, you can scale, move, rotate, zoom or pan around your images in order to highlight the most important aspects of your presentation. There are lots of transitions to choose from which are especially suited to large displays, HDTV screens and even VGA projectors.

You can opt to burn DVDs of your slideshows, although the developer recommends using Roxio Toast for this. In addition, you can transfer them to your iPod or export them to QuickTime. Most recently, FotoMagico has been updated to integrate much better with iPhoto. So for example, iPhoto libraries of photos show up correctly instead of a generic icon in FotoMagico.

The only thing FotoMagico really lacks is advanced options for tailoring your slideshow. Some of these are available in the Pro version although that’s obviously more expensive.

FotoMagico is a very powerful package for creating stunning photo presentations.

Layers can now have a mask, which lets you create interesting special effects. Masks can be animated independently from the layer image, movie, or title. Download a couple of sample slideshows here. Layer opacity can now be changed, thus enabling many interesting transparency effects. Auto Save is now supported, thus freeing you from having to select the Save command repeatedly while authoring a slideshow. Auto Save may be disabled in the Preferences window. Saving is now much quicker than before. Average save times for large slideshows have been reduced from a minute to less than a second in most situations. When resizing a title width, the title now stays centered, which is a much nicer behavior. When an audio track is muted, then any ducking occuring in this track is ignored. If a document window is obscured during fullscreen playback, various animations are now suppressed, to optimize playback performance. Color correction is reflected in Storyboard thumbnails. The ducking percentage textfield is enabled when needed. Sharing for DVD now exports 48 kHz audio instead of 44.1 kHz. Audio fades now sound similar in exported movies and live playback. Got rid of a visual glitch where all Storyboard thumbnails would briefly disappear after saving a slideshow. Got rid of a layout glitch in the Stage when a slideshow is first openend. Many edge case situations that led to inconsistent audio fades have been eliminated. These inconsistent states sometimes also caused failures to share a slideshow. Sharing assistant now warns you when chosen filenames contain illegal characters that could lead to problems down the road. Fixed incorrect rendering of layer opacity, if visibility was restricted to a portion of the slide lifetime. Fixed audio volume of a movie layer, that is not visible during whole slide lifetime. Audio timing is now much more reliable if a slideshow is started somewhere in the middle. Adding, moving, or adjusting very long audio files is now much quicker than before. Various small fixes.

Changes

• Layers can now have a mask, which lets you create interesting special effects. Masks can be animated independently from the layer image, movie, or title. Download a couple of sample slideshows here. Layer opacity can now be changed, thus enabling many interesting transparency effects. Auto Save is now supported, thus freeing you from having to select the Save command repeatedly while authoring a slideshow. Auto Save may be disabled in the Preferences window. Saving is now much quicker than before. Average save times for large slideshows have been reduced from a minute to less than a second in most situations. When resizing a title width, the title now stays centered, which is a much nicer behavior. When an audio track is muted, then any ducking occuring in this track is ignored. If a document window is obscured during fullscreen playback, various animations are now suppressed, to optimize playback performance. Color correction is reflected in Storyboard thumbnails. The ducking percentage textfield is enabled when needed. Sharing for DVD now exports 48 kHz audio instead of 44.1 kHz. Audio fades now sound similar in exported movies and live playback. Got rid of a visual glitch where all Storyboard thumbnails would briefly disappear after saving a slideshow. Got rid of a layout glitch in the Stage when a slideshow is first openend. Many edge case situations that led to inconsistent audio fades have been eliminated. These inconsistent states sometimes also caused failures to share a slideshow. Sharing assistant now warns you when chosen filenames contain illegal characters that could lead to problems down the road. Fixed incorrect rendering of layer opacity, if visibility was restricted to a portion of the slide lifetime. Fixed audio volume of a movie layer, that is not visible during whole slide lifetime. Audio timing is now much more reliable if a slideshow is started somewhere in the middle. Adding, moving, or adjusting very long audio files is now much quicker than before. Various small fixes.

Your photos are great. You’ve spent a lot of money on a good camera. You’ve invested in your pictures. They are invaluable. Are you going to waste all of this with a crappy presentation? In low resolution?

Your photos deserve to be shown. Let them move about. Zoom in. Add a subtle title here and there. Add your favorite music. Let them fit together perfectly with very cool transitions. Let them come alive.

Only the best will do for your photos. The best possible resolution. Take a HDTV screen or a highres projector. FotoMagico will make the best of every pixel available. Even if you just have a VGA projector or are creating a DVD, your photos will look better with FotoMagico.

The music is what makes a great slideshow. But only if you can time your slideshow according to the sound track. Only if you can use different songs for different parts of the show, only then you can create that magic atmosphere.

Your FotoMagico slideshow will be so good, your audience will want to take it home. Burn it on a DVD. Put it on your website. There are many ways to share your work. Take the iPod, for example. It does for ambitious photographers what the original iPod did for musicians: always take your work with you. Present at any time. Impress your clients. Close the deal.

This is where many other slideshow apps fail: Every one of your pictures is special. Some apps add black spaces at the left and the right to make your portrait format photos fit the screen. And what about ultrawide panorama photos?