Colin Mulvany has a great post (and nice examples) on his blog highlighting the benefits of using your archive pictures for slideshows. It came off the back of a comment commending the Spokane Review for a piece looking back at 40 years of snow.

Colin points out how easy these things are and how popular they can become. And he’s so right.

It’s one of the first things I tell editors when we are looking at multimedia. You have loads of archive. Stuff that no-one else has and it’s easy to get online.

There are two key things to note with archive slideshows

• They don’t need to be flash or soundlsides.
  The Spokane Review use Final cut pro and deliver in flash video. You could just as easily use Windows movie maker or Imovie. The content is still a slideshow.
• They don’t need narration
  But text and music is a good idea. This is especially important if you use a video delivery as you don’t get the non-linear navigation you do with soundslides.

If you are looking for a first stage of training then what about this:

• Check your diary and see what anniversaries are coming up
• Go through the archive
• If you are on a PC fire up Windows movie maker or imovie on a mac
• Create a slideshow of your best images.
• Link it to a follow up in the paper

As a follow up try another story but record an audio interview with someone associated with the story. It may even be the reporter, photographer or editor at the time.

A few quick ‘go-and-play’ links:

• A new version of soundslides is in Beta – Soundslides Plus
• Google have introduced Streetlevel to their Google maps. It seems to serve no other purpose than to make you say ‘cool’ a lot. It allows you to interact with…I’m not going to explain it. Just go and have ago. You can see an overview of the features here. I’ll warn you know that you will have to brave the site of a man in an orange lycra body suit – wrong, just wrong.
• Adobe labs have released a beta version of Visual Communicator 3. It works for 95 days and although the download and install process is a bit flakey its worth a look. Lot’s of other goodies to try there as well.

Have fun