While Flickr is lackin the fullscreen slideshow, luckily there are other programs to do that.
Flickr’s own slideshow is fine, but it definately lacks the fullscreen option. It is quite a diffrence between 500 pix and fullscreen slideshow. After noticing that Safari is having a plug in for that (Windows version coming soon) and browsing through the Flickr Tools, there seems to be some web page services and programs to replace this lack. One of them is Flickr AutoDownloadr.
Being a Windows desktop program Flickr AutoDownloadr does a pretty good job as a online service’s “add on”. It downloads the selected fotos to your computer and and displays them as a windowed or fullscreen slideshow. You can select one users or everyones potos by dates, tags, favourites, set and groups and order them as you like. The best thing is that you can make a shortcut to open almost any open page on Flickr as a slideshow. You can also use the program to download photos to your computer without showing slideshow.
Downloading and installing the program is straitforward and the user interface looks clear. Running the program first time it asks if you want to associate the ‘flickrss’ protocol with this program. You’d better to answer yes in order to be able to use the clever option to open the slideshow from the Flickr web page. All you have to do is to bookmark the following link in your web browser: javascript:void(location.href=’flickrss:’+location.href).
Now when you navigate to a page on Flickr and then select this bookmark, those photos will be displayed in a fullscreen slideshow. Slideshow opened this way uses the program settings from last time. Flickr AutoDownloadr can be also used from the command line.
Being an excellent program, there where also some problems during the test run. Sometimes some couldn’t be seen in a slideshow and program only showed the error message: Failed to set image to… Actually selecting sets did this every time. There could also be a button to just save the settings without starting a slideshow.
But anyway, while Flickr is lacking the fullscreen slideshow, this program is an excellent replace for that. And here is the tip: Chage the photo quality setting to high, go to Flickr Last 7 Days Interesting page and start the fullscreen slideshow from the bookmark, sit back and enjoy the show…
For web development testing purposes it would be very handy to have multiple verisions of Internet Explorer (IE) on Windows. Luckily it is possible.
