In preparation for my new job I’ve been signing up with a bunch of video-sharing sites. Thing is: I got no video camera. The video on my Fuji F10 is busted, and my iBook predates those with pinholes. One thing I do have plenty of is old-fashioned digital photos. The question, then: how to turn my photos into video slideshows?

Enter Slideroll.com, top hit for Google string “flickr photo video slideshow”. It looked like a legit, layman’s tool perfectly suited to the task. “Free Slideshow Videomaker!” says a button on their site. Fair enough. I poked around a bit, and decided to spring $7.50 for a two month test run.

Unfortunately, I didn’t poke around enough, and overlooked that the “Free Slideshow Videomaker” is, for now at least, only a Windows app. No slideshow videos today. Even so, the service seems very promising so I don’t regret the purchase. It’s been around since 2004 (ample time to develop a Mac version, eh?), and while the coup de grace feature remains out of Mac users’ reach, everything leading up to it feels solid.

The site is logically setup and UI behaves smoothly. In no time I had given it Flickr API access and had all my sets available for upload in a dropdown menu. While I admit I made no effort to explore any deeper features or editing functions, within 10 minutes I had uploaded a thick set of pics from SONAR in Barcelona, picked some music from Sonific (meh), saved and downloaded the whole thing. Not bad. Of course, this “download” is not a video, but a folder that can be processed into video…on a PC…and, let’s hope, eventually on a Mac.

As it stands, Slideroll does offer a somewhat compelling service. Unlike the embedded Flickr slideshows used below, an embedded Slideroll occupies less page real estate. It also takes a little less time to load, assumingly because it’s calling a prefab slideshow from Slideroll, rather than loading a raw Flickr Flash slideshow. Converting Sliderolls to videos, I hope, will make the result even more discrete, useful, and fast-loading when embedded from a videosharing site.

I am not particularly concerned by the 5000-photo upload limit. It’s generous to begin with, and it becomes irrelevant once I can depend upon Slideroll as a photo-to-video production tool – and you can just download, save, and repost the video – rather than a slideshow creation and hosting service. Of course, this imposes a different calculus on the whole situation: $7.50 bimonthly is $45 a year. Considering current freeware and webapp trends, not to mention a market of indie programs that can be had for a song, that’s a stupid expensive proposition for any application, much less an interdependent web-desktop tool. Make it a flat $25 or $30 for the 5000 photo ceiling and the (Mac, please) videomaker and it’s sold.

One thing I must note is that, at its default 360×240 setting, Slideroll is landscape oriented and crops photos rotated to portrait. There are both pan and zoom options, but I haven’t tested them. Increasing the aspect ratio to 360×360 appears to be a satisfactory, even pleasing band-aid, but I have no idea how that plays when converting to, and uploading as, video. Oh yeah, Web 2.0 brownie points for the (adjustable) rounded corners.

The jury is still out. Let’s hope Mr. Gaudreault can submit a Mac version of the Videomaker as additional evidence.

UPDATE: The first attempt at pasting code broke my site…insofar as it ruined my lovely center column layout by justifying to the page. I’m sure my own ignorance is responsible.

UPDATE 2: The “New MySpace Code” works just dany in Wordpress – though I don’t know why the lower corners are cropped.

UPDATE 3: Mr. Gaudreault was kind enough to comment (below). The prices above have been changed accordingly. Thank you, Mr. Gaudreault. I wait with bated breath for the Mac release!