Slide Show
(Version 1.11 for the PowerMac)
by Glen Bredon


Keyboard Commands during Show

LEFT ARROW       Sets reverse direction and brings up previous slide immediately.
RIGHT ARROW     	Sets normal direction and brings up next slide immediately.
MOUSE BUTTON   	Next slide in selected direction (only if clicked near bottom of screen).
SPACE                 Pauses slide (restart with another press of the space bar).
DELETE or DEL     Marks slide for deletion only if Pause is in effect (else does nothing).
                              You cannot miss this; it puts a big red X over the slide on the screen.
                              It then waits for another command (a second DELETE cancels it;
                              another press of the space bar un-pauses it, etc.).
ESCAPE               Brings up "Delete OK" dialog box if there are files marked for deletion.
                              If you select OK then, and only then, the marked files are moved to
                              the trash folder; they are never actually deleted.
+                         Adds one second to the slide duration.
-                          Subtracts one second from the slide duration (until the minimum 1).
1-9                      Sets slide duration to that number of seconds. Key 0 sets the fastest
                              possible display, a type of fast forward, and is only available from
                              the keyboard; not from the duration menu.

Operation upon Startup

When run, the program searches for a folder named SLIDES in the folder containing the Slide Show program. You can change this in "Preferences" under the File menu.

If this folder is not found then it searches in this order for one of the following folders in the boot volume:

SLIDES
PHOTOGRAPHY:SLIDES
SYSTEM FOLDER:APPEARANCE:DESKTOP PICTURES:PHOTOS
APPLE EXTRAS:SAMPLE DESKTOP PICTURES

If one of these is found then the pictures in it are automatically displayed in a slide show. If none of them exist or if the first one found does not contain displayable pictures then nothing happens and you can select a folder containing slides using the "Choose Slide Folder" item in the File menu.

General Operation

QuickTime should be installed on your PowerMac (it probably is) or only PICT type files can be displayed. Use the Extensions Manager to check that QuickTime is active. (If you don't have it, you can download it from Apple Computer's web site.)

Slides are displayed so as to use the maximum area of the screen. They are automatically resized to fit your screen exactly; no insignificant little images in the middle of nothing.

Use "Select Slide Folder" from the File menu to select a new folder to display. The new show should start immediately. To restart a show select Start Show (Command G).

Slide shows repeat forever until paused (space bar) or the program is quit. In the menus, you can choose to have slides presented in reverse order, random order, creation or modification date order or the default alphabetic order.

Frames

In the Frames menu list you can elect to have frames added to your slides as they are displayed, and the frame size can be adjusted. Frame color adjustments can be made in the Preferences item in the File menu. The "Shadow Size" option in the Frames menu refers to the dark line between the frame and the picture. Experiment to see what you like.

Captions

Captions, when enabled, are formed from the file names of the pictures. You can elect to have the true file names used, or the aliases of them instead if the selected folder contains aliases.

The captions are placed at the bottom of the screen for horizontal pictures and at the left for verticals.

File name extensions such as Ò.jpgÓ or Ò.gifÓ or "alias" etc. (indeed, any four character segment beginning with a period) are ignored when forming the caption title.

Beginning numerical digits in file names are also omitted from the caption; this allows renaming files (or aliases) by putting a number or date at the start in order to have your MacIntosh sort the directory using this data. For example you could use names such as "19870307My Picture" (where the numbers represent the date, March 7, 1987, when the picture was taken) and the Caption would be "My Picture."  Personally, I use 19955403 to mean frame #03 of roll #54 of year 1995, but this only works if you use less than a hundred rolls per year, or you must add a extra digit or two.  Remember that you can do this using the true file names, or aliases if you prefer provided that the use of aliases for captions is selected in the Captions menu item.

Moreover, any non-alphanumeric characters (except period) at the end of the file name are ignored for the caption. This feature is intended to provide targets for the find option, particularly when used in a saved show. This gives you many powerful options in organizing the way pictures will be displayed by the slide show. (Remember that these provisions can be used with aliases if so desired, leaving the actual filenames unchanged.)

Find

The "Find Slides" item in the File menu lets you select three search items using various criteria (such as "starts with," "contains," "does not contain"). Then the show will present only those slides from the selected folder meeting these criteria. Note that if the folder is large it may take a few seconds for a slide to be found if several dozen must be passed over. (After the first slide that will just mean that some slides may be displayed for a longer period than specified in the duration menu.) Note that you can have Find operate on alias names rather than the actual names of the slides and that this is independent of the use, or not, of aliases for captions.

Save/Open Show

The "Save Show" item in the File menu creates a very small file containing all the parameters presently set up (including folder name, frame, caption and color options, duration, find options and so on). If that file is double clicked (or selected with the Open Show command in the File menu) then all that data is loaded and the specified folder is opened and run as a slide show. To set up special preferences for such shows, select "Preferences" from the File menu and set up your new preferences, but exit by the "Use but Don't Save" button rather than the "Save" button. (If you use "Save" they become your default preferences, which you may not like.) Then save the show with the "Save Show" item in the File Menu. Note that you can have many different shows based on the same slide folder but differing in the Find options, in particular.

Export Show

The "Export Show" item in the File menu is the same as the "Save Show" item except that it forces the use of the slide folder named "Slides" in the same location as the exported file. It is intended to simplify sending a show to another person. Use it as follows:

Create a new folder to be sent to someone. Move the little file created by "Export Show" into this folder along with a copy of the Slide Show program if the recipient does not already have that. Create a new folder inside that one naming it "Slides" and put the picture files you wish to send into this "Slides" folder. They can be, but do not have to be, the same files you were looking at when you did the "Export Show." Then send the folder after compacting it in any way you can. The recipient can put the folder anywhere he wants. This has the following effect:

When the user double clicks on the exported show icon, the slides in the "Slides" folder are displayed with all the preferences that were in effect when you exported the show. (Note that this includes any "Find" specification; so you may want to be sure that there are none of those before you export the show.) Double clicking on the Slide Show program instead will either bring up the same show, but with the default preferences if the recipient does not have an existing preferences file for Slide Show, or it will act on his preferences if he does. Thus, the whole point of the "Export Slides" provision is to give a means to transport the preferences such as frame color and duration along with whatever slides you are sending, plus it forces use of the "Slides" folder you provide with it.

Rename Slides

The "Rename Slides" item in the Files menu presents each slide for renaming. When the rename dialog is presented there are two special features which simplify certain tasks: the Control-Q key will lop off the last four characters of the name (intended for deleting those awful MSDOS extensions such as ".jpg"); and the Control-W key changes all dashes to spaces (intended to easily counteract the inexplicable opposite action done by Adobe ImageReady droplets). An Undo restores the original name. File renaming does not actually take place until you come to the end of the folder or you select the "Quit Renaming" item in the rename dialog box. Then you are given a chance to abort the whole thing or to accept it.  Please note that there is no check that your new names are unique; if not then some files will not be renamed because the Mac system will not permit duplicate file names.  (I.e., nothing bad will happen except that some of your renaming may be rejected.) The main reason for the rename provision is to make it easy to add numbers to the start of the file names, or search characters to the end, but it is not limited to those purposes.  (I used it to rename hundreds of my slide files, and would not have attempted that without this provision of the Slide Show.)  If the files are aliases, the aliases are renamed and not the targets of the aliases. (You can rename the originals by selecting the folder containing them instead of a folder containing aliases.)

Preferences

In the preferences under the file menu you can select the default slide duration, background color, caption color, frames color, and the defaults for the various menu choices. You can also set the default folder for the slides.

You can delete the preferences file "GEBSlideShow Prefs" in your Preferences folder to return to all of the defaults. This file does not get written until you access and change preferences.

Background Operation

Slide show will run in the background (like an ever changing desktop picture) while you use other programs. Simply run the Slide Show, then switch to another program (or to the finder, etc.) using the "application menu" usually on the right of the menu bar, or use the apple menu to access another program.

Memory Requirements

The program is set up to require 20MB of memory which should be adequate for screen sizes to 768x1024. If you have problems, increase the memory requirement in the Slide Show file's Finder Info. For a screen size of 1200x1600 the program may require about 30MB for efficient operation.  For very large files such as high resolution images you may want to give it considerably more than that.

Suggestions

Since photos are displayed as large as possible (except for the menu bar area) and this usually means that the display height is 20 pixels less than your screen height, best results are obtained from pictures sized with such a height. For example, if your screen, like mine, is 768 pixels high, try to make slides 748 pixels high. (Even better, make verticals that height and horizontals the width of your screen.) It is not necessary to do this and most good quality pictures of reasonable size will display quite pleasantly.

If you elect to have frames, these take, in pixels, 4 times the value of "Frame Width" in the Preferences box, so you can adjust your picture size with this in mind if you wish.

You can, of course, just put actual pictures in the folder you want to display in a slide show. However, you can also put aliases of files located elsewhere on your system. To make aliases easily, open the folder in which you wish to put the aliases, and the folder containing the original pictures.  Select all the ones you want in the latter and then hold down the COMMAND and OPTION keys while you drag the files to the folder to receive the aliases. (You can also use the Finder's "Make Alias" command and drag the aliases, but this appends "alias" to the filename making it look messy.)

The "List non-pics" item in the File menu, reads through the directory and displays those files that the program cannot open as a picture. This is useful in detecting invalid aliases.  (Deleting and reestablishing the alias usually fixes the problem.)  The problem with some of these files may be simply that they are too large for the memory constraints of the program; just increase the memory allocation.  The slide show warns you about files that are too large; they cause no damage, but are just not displayed.

Program distribution

This program is freeware, meaning that you may copy it freely and give it away, but do not sell it. Even though it is free, everything is done "by the book" to my knowledge; eg., its creator code is registered with Apple Computer.  Let me know if you like it:

My email:  bredon@sierratel.com
My photographic web site:  www.sierratel.com/bredon