AnvSoft Photo Slideshow Maker Platinum 5.5

This powerful tool allows you to create awesome slideshow presentations with your photos and FLV videos. It creates your presentations in Adobe Flash format (SWF), ready to be published on the Internet. You can add audio files in several popular formats – and even audio CD tracks – as soundtrack for your presentations. You can easily decorate your slideshows thanks to the many themes included.

The program offers a simple but functional user interface which allows you to create your presentations using three intuitive tabs. "Photo/Video", the first tab, allows you to select the source photos and/or FLV videos you want to use for your slideshow. This tab includes a built-in file explorer for that purpose, though it only allows you to access local files and folders. You can add random or fixed transition effects between your slides, set a title, a description and a hyperlink for your images, as well as dynamic texts. You can also use the included photo editor to apply some effects to your source images – thus, you can rotate, add art clips, effects, crop and filter them.

Next is the "Theme" tab, which allows you to apply from very simple to complex decorations to your presentations. The program includes a lot of predefined themes, classified into categories, for you to choose from. Some of the categories are Basic, Professional, 3D, Premium, and HTML 5. However, you can also create your custom decorations thanks to the program’s template editor. This section also allows you to configure the background music for your slideshow. As stated before, you can use audio files or CD tracks, which you can also play back and trim.

Last, is the "Publish" tab, which allows you to select the output type and the Flash embed method. The program is capable of creating a Flash file only, a gift presentation CD/DVD or a Flash file for uploading to "Go2Album" (a free online album service offered by AnvSoft). As for the Flash embed method, you can select between "Object Embed Tag" and "JavaScript SWF Object". If you select any of the Flash options, the program will create two output files – an SWF file, which is the Flash animation itself, and an HTML file, which is a webpage with the Flash video embedded in it and ready to be published on the Internet.

Finally, I will mention that though there are other editions of this program – Free and Professional – this Platinum edition is the one that offers the most complete set of features. For example, adding FLV videos to your slideshows and the "Video" themes category are exclusive to this Platinum edition.