Photo Slideshow Themes

Dono52 wrote:

It seems that Apple has become complacent with developing its Slideshow Themes.

I have been working on a project using Sliding Panels and it has been like wrestling a crocodile or herding cats.

Seriously, whatever the algorithm is for changing photos around it is just ridiculous. I have ZERO control over placement of photos in a certain order.

The moment I replace a portrait photo with a landscape one, the page changes either the number of photos on the screen or the arrangement (that I've spent ages perfecting!) or both. Not only that but the changes can impact on the appearance of previous pages of the slideshow.

It is not Apple has become complacent. Most of the recent changes are attempts to get things automatic and making it unnecessary for the user to take control. Apple is providing artificial intelligence tools to select photos for memories, to recognize objects, to arrange photos in slideshows. if we are happy with the results, we do not have to do anything. But if we do not like the placement it is very hard to get a result we like. The advanced slideshows themes are having a fixed sequence of templates. Trying to move photos between the templates is indeed like herding cats. If you want to have full control over a slideshow use the old themes with only one photo per slide. I am sticking with the Classic layout. There it is easy to control the timing and the sequence of slides. And it has the added benefit, that the audience will not be distracted by the effects, but will actually look at my pictures. I tried once the Places theme in Aperture. My audience complained about motion sickness caused by the wild animation.

I wonder why the user isn't given the same control over the appearance as we have when creating a book. In that project, I can decide the number of photos per page and what style I would like, as well as having the ability to curate the photo placement to my wants.

It is the other way round, I am sorry say. As you may have noticed, Apple stopped the support for print products completely and is leaving this service to third-party products. We can no longer create Apple Books, Calendars, Cards in Photos 4.0 on Mojave. We are restricted to third-party project extensions. Apple did not explain why, but perhaps the reason has been, that the the books in Photos have never been as flexible as in iPhoto, and so apple removed it completely instead of improving the books. We could not even resize the text fields or photo placeholders in Photos books.