Existing programs are not well suited for making interactive slide shows. The biggest problems are importing and sorting slides. There are also other problems such as duplicate file names on different images, and disk space wasted by creating copies of all the files in order to store the slide show.
It's essential to be able to sort slides easily in any desired order. Most existing programs only sort by date, filename, or comments, but manual rearrangement into a logical order requires tedious and unsatisfactory renumbering the images by hand, usually by renaming the files. Many "slide show" programs export still images to video, as a DVD or file. This is expressly NOT the objective of this program, because video has huge storage requirements, and it may also reduce the resolution.
The basic requirements are pretty simple (leaving details for later):
(1) The user should be able to sort images by dragging and dropping.
(2) The user should be able to import multiple images with a single drag and drop.
(3) For viewing, the presenter should be able to navigate forwards or backwards to the next or previous slide.
(4) To save storage space, the slide show should be saved as a list of links, not as copies of images.
(5) Finally, the program should optionally export a slide show as a set of numbered images, so the slide show could be transported to a different computer or a TV.
LibreOffice Impress and similar presentation programs are the only programs that I have found that solve the sorting problem. LibreOffice Impress has other problems, unforunately. Images must be imported one at a time, and each image must be tediously resized and centered on its own slide. (The program sometimes resizes and centers automatically, but I have not found it to work reliably.) The slide shows also require a lot of disk space because the images are embedded instead of being stored as links.
Does anyone have any information on programs that fit all or most of the requirements? Are there any open-source programs that are close enough to use as a promising start?
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