Random order slides in Photos slideshow ?

The screen saver does do random order slideshows, but crucially lacks any way to change how long each image is displayed. Another annoying example of Apple-knows-best trumping actual usefulness. I love the screen saver slideshow's Ken Burns-style in shuffle mode, & long wished there was a way to change the display interval, so was delighted when iPhotos gave us that ability. But now Apple, unquestionably NOT knowing best, has taken it away, so it is again impossible to view a Ken Burns style slideshow in shuffle mode with display interval of your own choosing

Why? Ours is not to wonder why; ours is but to buy & buy.

You mean the link they ignore, that link?

Can anyone recommend a slideshow app that DOES have shuffle?

This is (at least) the second time Apple has screwed over customers who use the iPhoto/Photos slideshow. The first time they stuck bad code in iOS 8 which caused slideshows to crash after 15-20 minutes. The problem was reported to Apple Tech Support (live people) in early October 2014 but Engineering didn't issue a fix until April 2015, 6 months later, in IOS 8.3.

Another 6 months later Apple screws it up again by dropping random/shuffle.

Seconding Gordian Caesar, what are other ways to run slideshows WITH random order on Apple desktops and mobile devices? Is Lightroom a viable option? How about photos uploaded from Lightroom to Flickr?

Here are two Mac apps that both can do slideshows in random order (aka "shuffle mode"). Both great.

ViewIt http://www.hexcat.com/viewit/

GraphicConverter http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/

Great catch. Never used ViewIt, but GraphicConverter is awesome. And has been around forEVER.

Daisy, You are so right, I am angry and actually devastated. The shuffle feature has made slideshows of family photos the center of attention at holidays and other family gatherings for us, even to the point of becoming a game, and this is a very serious loss for our family, and an act of utter stupidity and thoughtlessness on the part of Apple. Not the first. As someone in the thread says, they rave about all the new features but they never tell you what you will lose. I would certainly never have upgraded if I knew this would happen, and I will be exploring a possible downgrade back to iPhoto. I will never buy into upgrade fever again.

Well, the people have spoken, & it seems that Terence Devlin & others of his ilk who discount the importance of random order slideshows are wrong. It is a big deal. In fact, as far as most ppl are concerned, an app that does slideshows but can't do them in random order isn't just missing a feature -- it's broken. And that's what Photos is now. The appropriate response is not to send in a feature suggestion; it's to send in a bug report.

the people have spoken,

They have? When?

it seems that Terence Devlin & others of his ilk who discount the importance of random order slideshows are wrong.

When did I do that? Please, tell me...

as far as most ppl are concerned

How do you know what most people want? Just curious...

I, too, find this a very annoying omission. Terence makes a good point: just because I want a particular feature doesn't mean I should expect it to be included, since, if any feature anyone wanted were included, the program would be unwieldy. But, in this case, I suspect that quite a lot of people will miss this feature, and Apple really should have retained it. (And I didn't read Terence's post to say that random-order slideshows would be a needless complexity or shouldn't have been included, only that Apple needs to know how many people want any given feature and how important it is to them in order to know whether it's worth including.)

I hope there will be enough feedback and pressure, directly or indirectly, to convince Apple that random-order slideshows should be put back ASAP in a Photos update. In the meantime, I'll try ViewIt.

TangledWing,

So you do family photo slideshows. Me too! I have over 2,000 photos in my main album, plus several smaller albums. Just like you, I run them on my iPad at holidays and other family gatherings. They're always a hit. Last holiday season, iPad slideshows did not work because of Apple's bad code that caused them to crash after 15-20 minutes. It took Apple 6 moths, but they fixed the problem and I was looking forward to having slideshows again for the upcoming holidays. Now no shuffle, which makes the slideshows useless for me.

I'm totally annoyed with Apple putting out a good product, breaking key features either intentionally or unintentionally (twice within a year) then following it up with their Engineering Department's arrogance - "yeah, we know we created a problem and we may fix it or we may not."

I'm testing other options. So far, the best solution I've seen for having a slideshow on the iPad has been to create a private album in Flickr (pro account), upload my 2,000+ photos, and purchase the FlickStackr app ($1.99) for my iPad. FlickStackr has optional random order and allows control of the display duration time. So far, so good. I'll let this group know how it goes.

Hi Daisy, ViewIt is working well for me, including shuffle, and with thousands of photos, including multiple folders. But there is no Ken Birns effect and the only slide transition seems to be the abrupt cut (i.e. no fade, etc.) I wrote to the developer at HexCat (Zdzislaw Losvik) and he answered promptly and was very nice but is busy with other things. I told him I'd pay extra for a deluxe version, perhaps he'd respons if you wrote him too. Personally the shuffle feature is more important to me, although I would love to have it all, as I did with iPhoto. What I read about GraphicConverter made it seem like Adobe Photoshop, which I have, and not a convenient slideshow viewer, but you might know or guess differently. Oh, and I haven't figured out how to make iPhoto libraries work with ViewIt yet, just Finder folders, which drag and drop nicely. I'm guessing I'll find a way to use the libraries with it when I have time to explore that. By the way, you can rotate photos from within the slideshow, just as you used to be able to with iPhoto slideshows a couple of versions back, but the rotation doesn't transfer automatically to the originals in the folders. Soooo... ViewIt was a good suggestion (from Delysid), well worth $22, but not perfect. Please let me know if you find out or figure out anything else. Thanks so much, TangledWing

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They talked about easy it was to set up slide shows. It seems it is easy because their is only one way to so it. I want random presentations and I want to change the order in which the slides are presented.

One solution is to download an old version of iPhoto (don't link to an existing library, create a new one), load your slide photos, and run your random slideshow. You can download the old versions of iPhoto here: Apple - Support - Downloads. In fact, you may still have an old version of iPhoto in your applications folder if you used to use iPhoto on that machine.