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Provides: Photo slideshow generation

Format: Download (retail package available in some countries)

Developer: Boinx Software

Minimum Requirements: 800MHz G4 PowerPC, Mac OS X v10.4, 512MB RAM, QuickTime v7.1, graphics card with 64MB VRAM (computers with an ATI Radeon 7500 (M6 and RV200) graphics card can not export movies)

Processor Compatibility: Universal

Retail Price: Express - $49.00; Pro - $129.00

Availability: Out now

Version Reviewed: 2.1

iPhoto is free. Yes. iMovie, too. I get that. I certainly understand the appeal of sticking with software that comes pre-installed on your computer, especially when it's developed by the same company who makes the hardware. Both iPhoto and iMovie see frequent use by me, and I have mostly good things to say about both programs.

Mostly.

Unfortunately, neither program is all that great for creating slideshows. iMovie is too clunky with its odd presets and inability to just be simple, and iPhoto doesn't offer enough features. This is where FotoMagico 2 steps in, and Apple agrees. They awarded FotoMagico an Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X User Experience 2006 Runner-Up. You only need to open FotoMagico once to understand why; because Boinx gets it.

Without reading one instruction, I opened a new project, selected my output destination, and was dragging photos from iPhoto into the FotoMagico timeline. Within five minutes, I was controlling effects and adding titles. In less than half an hour, I'd put together a three minute slideshow set to music I had stored in iTunes. It really is that simple, and yet the end result looks as if I'd spent hours on it.

Details. Here's how it works. (From this point on, understand I'm reviewing the Pro version of FotoMagico. For a list of differences between this and the Express version, visit the Boinx website.)

Upon launching, a splash screen asks if your target destination for the slideshow is a computer monitor, a television or a projector. Subcategories apply, as you can determine your size/resolution and ratio of each device. This is where you also tell the software you want to work on a previously created project.

The bulk of the user interface is taken up by the photo area. To the right of this are your media drawers: images, audio and options. The images drawer pulls in everything you have stored in iPhoto, including any photo albums you have set up. In fact, you can also select to look at the last roll, the last 12 months, etc., just like with iPhoto. If you don't use iPhoto, you can point FotoMagico to a specific folder on your hard drive. If you have FotoMagico Pro, you can also set it to communicate directly with Aperture instead of iPhoto.

Audio works the same way, but with iTunes. However, it's not as friendly. Although your Playlists show up, there's only room for the song title and duration in the window, making it hard to find the song you want if they're categorized by artist. You can recategorize them by song title, but it's still a bit messy.

To get photos into your slideshow, you simply drag them from the media drawer into the timeline. The duration for which the slide will display is shown below the slide, and you can alter this by right clicking on the number, selecting from 1 to 10 second or telling the slide to advance on your mouse click (helpful for presentations) or at an audio marker which you set in the audio options drawer.

Once you have a photo in place, you can either have it sit still for its duration or you can control the pan and zoom in ways about which iPhoto and iTunes can only dream. Positioning the photo is a simple matter of dragging it over the display window. The areas outside the display area are shaded, and guides pop up to tell you when it's centered vertically and horizontally. The zoom and rotation are controlled with separate by similar slider knobs, and you control the start and finish of the photo individually. Seeing them side by side makes this easy to do, although I often found myself adjusting the finishing point when I meant to be playing with the starting point, and vice versa.

The options menu provides quick access to the same controls as those in the timeline, along with some others. For instance, you can determine whether you want your pan and zoom to start abruptly, ease in, ease out or both. You can also select from 15 transitions, most of which are quite nice and usable in professional presentations.

Music is handled the same way, basically, but with much less control. Because FotoMagico forces you to fade out the audio at the end of the slide show, you have to first set up the slides before dragging in the music. If you add photos to your timeline, thereby increasing the length of your project, you'll have to delete the audio and bring it back in to make it fit. Also, the audio has to start at the beginning of a slide. If you want it to start in the middle, you'll have to drag the photo in twice and half the duration on each. Even worse, there are no volume controls for the audio, so you can't fade the music in and out. You'll either have to rely on FotoMagico to do that when you're show's over, or do it yourself ahead of time.

That's not as much of a chore as it could be, because FotoMagico displays the current slideshow duration in the timeline. If you know the length of the song ahead of time, you can just add photos and adjust their durations until you hit the exact length of the song; no guesswork involved.

The title capabilities are also a bit troublesome. You can control the typeface and color, alignment, and opacity, and title screens can fade in and out using the same controls as the pan and zoom feature. In fact, you can even pan and zoom the titles just as you would a photo. However, actually entering type can get annoying, as it seemed I had to randomly single click, double click or triple to activate type within the text box. It's easy enough to position the text box where you want, and you can make it larger by dragging on any corner. But the restriction to only have one text box means you can't get too fancy with what you're doing. I'd like to see some default formats and placement here, too, as we get in iMovie.

Text can be written over a photo by simply placing the playhead before that image. If you want the text over black, you need to first insert a blank slide. It seems that blank slides can only be black, which seems an odd restriction. To get another color in there, I had to create an image of that color, import it into FotoMagico, and use it as if it were a photo.

Once your slideshow is done, there are myriad formats to which it can be exported: iDVD, DVD, web, iPod, HD 720, HD 1080, GarageBand (for creating a soundtrack to your slideshow), QuickTime Movie, MP4 and 3GPP, most of which allow you to customize the settings if you know what you're doing.

You can also select Create Player, which bundles your slideshow with a standalone FotoMagico player so anyone can view your high quality presentation without having FotoMagic installed. Even better is the Screensaver option, which (obviously) will format your slideshow as a module compatible with Apple's screensaver app, audio and all. You can even determine if the screensaver will expire after a certain number of uses or after a given date.

There's plenty more to discover in FotoMagico, but I want to leave some of that to you. That's the fun of this program. And whether you're creating a slideshow of the kids or of a vacation for family and friends, or you're presenting photos for a business presentation or conference, FotoMagico presents you with almost all the tools you'll need while not making it feel like work. Whether you'll want to go with the Pro version or Express will depend upon your material and audience. But if you're working with photos on any level, whether you should be working with FotoMagico 2 shouldn't even be a question.