SlideShare is a cool FREE site where you can upload your slides from PowerPoint or PDF file so they can be viewed online. You can even embed a link in your blog and upload an MP3 file that you can sync with your images. I haven’t done the latter, but this could be very interesting.
I encourage all artists to learn to use PowerPoint. You just never know when someone is going to ask you to do a presentation about your art. This would be good practice for you.
PS
I uploaded one of my workshop PPT slideshows and it's apparent that I'd need to change a bunch of fonts for it to work. Just use the basic serif and sans serif fonts and test them before you spend a lot of time on the presentation
6 thoughts on “Get a slideshow of your art online”
I hope you don’t mind this reply Alyson – as someone who worked with Powerpoint for years I’d strongly suggest artists look for an alternative. It’s a very bloated programme that takes a lot of space and memory. Not everyone has it on their computer either (or may not have the same fonts as you), so if you are asked to do a presentation be aware that you may either need to use your own computer or be sure the other person has PPT or a Powerpoint viewer (which is free and can be downloaded from the Microsoft website). Depending on the computer an image-laden PPT presentation can run very slowly. An easier and more universal format would be to simply create linked html pages. These would run on any computer, regardless of software installed, and you can hide the toolbars in a browser for something like a presentation. Just remember to save the whole project including your relative image folders. This option also works well for a CD or DVD for sending to galleries if you want a presentation-like file for them to open rather than just folders of images. 🙂
Thanks for this information, Alyson. And Tina for your comments about your experience. I’m referring my Home Biz Notes readers to your post. I think there are many possibilities in this for them.
Tina: I certainly understand your issues with PPT. The program I listed here, however, makes your PPT accessible to everyone because it becomes a Web-based movie. As I said, I did discover that the fonts must be basic fonts as my upload got all wacky on me.
Also, my husband recommends Apple’s Keynote as an alternative to PowerPoint: http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/
And I forgot to recommend Open Office, a free PC office suite of software from Sun that is MS compatible. Impress is their presentation component: http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html I personally have only used the word processing and spreadsheet components.
Thanks for the nudge about the html pages Tina. I just made my first one to burn onto a CD to send to a consultant, and it really looks sharp. I need to remember to make the file that is the pseudo web page obvious, so that people will immediately know to click on it. But as someone without a personal web page, this is a great tool! I can’t imagine making someone page through a power point or worse yet, open jpeg after jpeg!