Slide.ly and a Sale

I woke up this morning to a comment on my Animoto post about trying out another program called slide.ly  And I'm always up for giving anything a shot.  So here's a quick video featuring the jpegs I'm working on with our Armadillo Clipart packages.  All in different states of "doneness".




Armadillo Pics by Slidely - Slideshow maker


Now- I will need to play a bit more- but here are some pros and cons from my ten minute attempt:

Pro - it's free, and you can have up to the length of the song you choose- not just thirty seconds.

Con - the video of the song plays in the corner.  Not sure if I like that.

Pro - relatively easy to load images, and select a song

Conish - I haven't figured out how to rearrange the order of the slides, or add a caption yet - but that was probably an option on the photo interface page and I just didn't notice.

Pro - you can select songs from other locations besides what they are offering on the site - like you can fetch something from You Tube for example.  There are also lots of different places where you can fetch your photos from as well - but I'm not sure that this wasn't also available on Animoto.

Con - If you go back a step, it doesn't save your choice from the step you were at.  So, I decided to add in more photos after I had picked the song.  I went back, added the photos easy enough, but when I went forward again I had to find my song again.  Which isn't a huge deal - but I sort of like things left the way I left them.

Pro - it pinned cleanly from the site- and in fact made a nice large, clear picture for the pin - and Animoto pins from the site too- but it wasn't as crisp of a photo as slide.ly.

Con - the pin still diverts back to the site, instead of just playing within the pin.  But to be fair- Animoto does this too.


Ok- and I just now went back to the program and figured out how to add captions, and sort photos, and pick a song without it getting lost if I click back and forth.  So some of my cons are now irrelevant.

So here's a second attempt, where I resorted the pictures to try to go with the lyrics just a little bit. 


Armadillo take two by Slidely - Slideshow maker

And it turns out you can go back and edit a finished published production.  So I was able to go back to this one and add in more captions and change the title of the presentation.


Hmmm - overall, I still lean toward Animoto for making school presentations.  I like the various choices of backgrounds.  Slide.ly does not have as many.  Actually, they pretty much have three basic styles and then you can just change what sorts of things float across. 

I would say that I liked the Animoto interface better- but that might be because I tried it first.  It wasn't that slide.ly was bad- I just kept expecting it to work like the other. 

I do like how you have more opportunities to choose music on slide.ly - but 300+ choices on Animoto isn't something to sniff at. 

 I like how slide.ly hasn't limited me to 30 seconds.  It allows for 90 photos.  Pretty good.

I might be likely to use slide.ly if I wanted a specific hit song and a montage of photos.  This might be a good choice for an end of the year photo show.  But Animoto still wins my heart for making lesson intros.

Thank you, Ben, for the suggestion.  It was fun to try out- and my daughter thought it was pretty cool too.  She was not pleased in being limited to 30 seconds when making a photo montage of her and her baby brother. It bears further exploration.

In other news - The Meek Moose is having a sale from today through Saturday- the whole store is 20% off!  Go get some goodies!


Update:  I haven't been able to get the videos to play after publishing this post.  Even on the site.  Which hopefully only means there's an overloaded internet or something.  Let me know if you can get them to load or not, if you don't mind.  Because if you can't- that is a bit of a con, if I do say so myself.  Animoto offers a link as well as code for embedding- but slide.ly does not.

Update 7/4/13:  It is now working when I try it on my computer.  So I'm chalking it up to a traffic jam on the internet highway.  My daughter has also decided that she likes this better than Animoto - for the sole reason that she was able to do a photo montage with her favorite Taylor Swift song.  Which leads to the following possibility - students might prefer that sort of option as well.  You can set the slide show to only play for the length of the number of photos- so the song would fade out.  This way, if you don't want all four minutes of Maroon Five (but you know you would!) you could limit your kids to so many pictures so that the show gets cut to a set amount of time.

Only thing you'll have to watch for- is that the music video does play in the corner.  So you will have to monitor your kids' selections.  It might be solvable with a you tube search for lyrics only - like how the Queen music is playing the corner of mine- but then you've got to look out for the lyrics too.  I'd never heard this particular Queen song- and I was completely on board with it being ok until we got into the whole sex machine deal.  Ok for adults- second graders would freak out.  And also highly sensitive nine year old daughters about to enter 4th grade.  "Moooooooooom!  You're soooooo gross!  And you put that on the internet?!  Don't you know that'll be out there FOREVER!"  Thank you, Disney channel, for teaching my daughter internet safety...