Creating a Digital Slideshow


Computers give photographers an opportunity to create new means of communicating with clients, both existing and potential. The mailshot has long been a staple method of self-promotion, usually consisting of a printed leaflet or brochure. This can be quite an expensive procedure, particularly when it has to be repeated six months later.

An alternative method is to produce a digital slide presentation of your portfolio on a floppy disk, essentially for mailing to advertising and design clients, all of whom will have access to a Mac. The fundamental problem to overcome is the limited capacity of a 1.4Mb floppy disk. This necessarily means that the images must be highly compressed, and open at low-resolution if the slide show is to consist of more than two or three pictures. However, the benefit of this approach is that the images cannot be misappropriated or used without your permission, due to their inherently low resolution. Nonetheless, they will appear in acceptable quality on the screen.


The most economic route to acquiring the images in digital form is to copy existing transparencies on to 35mm colour negative film, and have it processed and transferred to Kodak PhotoCD. Each PhotoCD holds around 100 images, at five resolutions, and will cost about 50p per scan, plus the cost of the blank CD and the film process. The images can now be opened in Photoshop, at screen resolution of 72dpi, and cropped to typical screen dimensions of 640 x 480 pixels. This results in a file size of 900K, which can be reduced to less than 70K by applying JPEG compression.

In practice, it is possible to squeeze about 20 slides on to a floppy in this way. Some image correction may be necessary, to remove any colour casts created by the CD scanning. For screen-only presentations, the rule of thumb is: if it looks right, it is right. Give each slide a numerical value, starting at 01, to locate its position within the presentation. Include a simple slideshow application, like the freeware KPT Quickshow, and you have a slideshow on a floppy. Double-clicking on the Quickshow icon runs the slideshow in the sequence of the numbered slides. You may want to make the first and last slides title and closing screens respectively, containing information about yourself and contact details. Include a ReadMe file with instructions for running the presentation.


The slide show can be reproduced as many times as necessary, when required, for the price of the disks. It can be updated, or replaced completely far more economically than having a new mailer printed. My experience of this approach is that while paper-based material often hits the wastebasket 30 seconds after arrival, a floppy disk will be inserted into the nearest Mac, and may be viewed by several people. As an addded bonus, it lets your computer-literate design and advertising clients know that you have joined them on the technological bandwagon.