Flash Slideshow Software

Most of my weekend was spent laboriously locating and consolidating my digital photo collection over the last 8 years. You would think that my nack for organization would have payed off in this area, but you’d be wrong. 😉 It took combing through 4 old hard drives, multiple Ghost images, an Iomega Peerless Drive, and a Terapin Mine to consolidate my photos since 2000. I now have close to all of my 3,000 photos and videos accounted for.
My main motivation for *finally* consolidating my photo collection is for my wiki-based travel log. Fueled by my recent post on the Personal Memex, I decided to finish cataloging and detailing all of my trips and travels since the turn of the century. This was by no means a simple feat. I’m actually only partially done at this point, but have enough semantic detail and information to make finding out details of each trip a breeze. My next major step is to integrate my photo repository with my wiki.
I love software like Picasa for managing my photo collections and albums. However, I’m looking for something that can be easily viewed over the web. My thought was to use some simple flash-based photo/slideshow viewer to embed directly into the wiki. I’ve been collecting links for some flash-based slideshow applications and figured I’d give them a whirl. Here are the major ones that I’m aware of:

• MonoSlideShow ($19.95) – I’ve used this application in the past, and have embedded slideshows directly into my blog posts. It’s fairly comprehensive and gets the job done
• SimpleViewer (Free) – Similar to MonoSlideShow, but with some additional options. I like the ability to right-click and open the image into a new window
• WorldMap/TripperMap ($9.74 / year) – This blew me away when I first saw it. Slideshows with Map integration. TripperMap supports FlickR right now, but support for other images sources is being developed.
• SlideShowPro ($29.00) – As with TripperMap, this application stuck me as quite impressive. The interface is visually appealing, and it also supports video playback. Very nice! I decided to experiment with this one and see if it suits my needs.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I think it does illustrate some pretty compelling flash-based slideshow applications. I’m curious what other software is out there. In the meantime I plan on experimenting with SlideShowPro, and will share my feedback on a subsequent post of creating an impressive wiki-based photo and travel journal.