Using a tool called the Moment Maker, you create each "Moment" (as the shared media is called) by adding notes, assigning an emotion, adding the date, location, and the names of the people who were in the moment, in addition to the media itself. You can choose to add the photos and videos either from your computer, from publicly shared content on the web via a search tool, or from your own accounts at various online services including flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Picasa.

A Few Stumbles

The Moment Maker tool is relatively easy to use, but could use a little simplification. For example, the first time you go to use flickr, the service needs to authorize your account. Although you're in the middle of "moment creation," thisMoment doesn't perform the authorization using a separate tab or pop-up window. Instead, you're forced to save the moment as a draft, head to your preferences, and authorize flickr from there. Had I known that I'd have to drop what I was doing to configure these settings, I would have headed to my preferences first, then created my Moment. Even better, some sort of walkthrough or prompt to set up your associated services in the beginning would have been useful. UPDATE: The company tells me that you won't see a prompt to link your services if you log in via Facebook Connect from a "moment" page, which, of course, is what I did. You might do the same, so I stand by my assertion that this process needs to be easier. Even the prompt you're supposed to see isn't as obvious as the link to "add a moment" at the top of the screen.

Another slight drawback was the search feature once connected to my flickr account. Although a search box is displayed, entering in a query returned photos that were clearly not mine, but pulled from the public stream. Considering that flickr Pro users like myself probably have hundreds of photos (or thousands!) to sift through, being able to search your own images is a critically important feature. There is a way to search your own images, but it's odd that it wouldn't be the default setting. Instead you have to click the link that says search images "from me" to find your own photos. I didn't even see this option the first time I used it!

Still, when you get through the challenges of locating your content, the end result is an attractive, side-scrolling slideshow of photos and videos which you browse through using the site's timeline feature. These slideshows can be set to public or private as you choose.

Social Sharing

If simple slideshow creation was all the site did, it would probably languish in obscurity since it's already somewhat competing with other photo slideshow creation tools like flickr and Slide. The addition of video and an attractive UI would only take thisMoment so far.

However, the beauty of thisMoment is that it lets you push the content out across the web. After creating a moment, you have the option to post it to Facebook and/or Twitter or email it to friends. Thanks to thisMoment's integration with these social web services, it also automatically identified certain contacts of mine already using the site and allowed me to select them from a list of "my connections" instead of having to type in email addresses.

Another change since the service was in private beta is that it now allows you to access embed codes for publicly shared moments and you can promote them on social sites like Digg, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, and others through a "share" widget located at the bottom of the slideshow.

Premium "Momentos"

At launch time, thisMoment announced content licensing agreements with The New York Times, the Time Inc. Lifestyle Group and Road & Track. These companies will offer branded versions of thisMoment called "Momentos." Surprisingly, these moments weren't featured on the company's homepage nor were they easily accessible via site navigation or search. That's an odd choice - you would think that if they have access to premium content, they would find a way to highlight it better.

In the future, thisMoment plans to expand their offerings to include an iPhone application - it should arrive in the App Store in a few weeks. A Facebook app is available now.

Overall, the PhotoPeach site feels very straightforward, as it just focuses on the essentials of creating an online slideshow. PhotoPeach only features two themes for its slideshow, a 'spiral view' and a standard slideshow view with zooming images. A small library of sound effects that you can add to your captions and a selection of background music round out PhotoPeach's core feature set.

Thanks to a major update to PhotoPeach that was released yesterday, you can now also embed your slideshows on your blog, as well as on Facebook and MySpace. Of course, PhotoPeach also provides you with a link to your slideshow on the company's servers. In addition, the company has introduced a new Java uploader, and you can import your photos from Flickr, Picasa, or Facebook as well.

There was only one feature that we didn't like on PhotoPeach. While you can use PhotoPeach's own music library, you can also embed music from YouTube videos. This is a great idea, but these videos appear in a little window at the bottom of your embed, which is not only incredibly distracting, but it also blocks some of the navigation features of the embed.

Easy and Straightforward

PhotoPeach is one of those sites that don't stand out because of their amazing features, but simply because they do one task, and they do it very well. If you want to embed a slideshow into you blog post, MySpace, or Facebook page, and you don't care for fancy effects, then PhotoPeach is one of the best tools we have seen for doing this lately.

1) Jazz Up Your PowerPoint

Just because you're stuck using PowerPoint, that doesn't mean your slideshow has to be boring. Get a professional template, read Slide:ology, then choose one or more of the following plugins to add something unique: LiveWeb to surf the net from within the PowerPoint, the Office Labs pptPlex addin which makes PowerPoints deem-zoomable, the Cooliris plugin which makes slideshows 3D just like their browser plugin does, or Freepath, which lets you mashup your slideshows with other web content.

2) SlideRocket

SlideRocket is an online presentation app built on Adobe's Flex platform. Like any presentation app, SlideRocket offers powerful slide and presentation authoring tools, transitions, image and video manipulations and animations, and charting and table creation. You can even import your PowerPoint slides to get started. However, SlideRocket also offers some unique features like the ability to import your own fonts, a plugin architecture that will allow third-parties to create their own transitions and effects, and an offline Adobe AIR-based player. (You can read our full review here).

3) Web Slides

If instead of bullet points, you're discussing web content, the application called WebSlides from Diigo, makers of the social bookmarking application (also called Diigo), can help. With WebSlides, you can turn your bookmarks or feeds into interactive web content. The application works with their bookmarking tool to automatically allow the creation of slideshows from a list of your bookmarks. The RSS option may be less useful as it only allows the import of one RSS feed, not an entire OPML file.

4) Agglom

After downloading a browser plugin, you can click on the new Agglom button at any time to save all the URLs from each tab in your browser as a set of links. These links can be shared with others via one URL provided to you by the service. One of the options for viewing the links is to view them as a slideshow. Those you share the URL with can view the slideshow with you, access it later, get any changes made to it by RSS, leave comments and suggest additional links.You can set the resulting slideshow to public or private or even password protect it. However, for use in presentations, you could simply play the slideshow of web content. (Read our full review here.)

5) Flowgram

If you want to narrate a tour through web content instead, the new application called Flowgramlets you create a rich, multimedia tour of your content. However, Flowgram isn't limited to web content alone. You can actually mix together web pages, RSS feeds, photos, audio, custom pages, and Office documents including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDFs. The resulting Flowgram runs as a sure-to-please Flash-based application that's ready for embedding on the company's intranet site later on as further proof of your media mastery. In a way, Flowgram is a lot like the oddly-named MyJugaad.in, which allows for slideshows of web pages, videos, and images sourced from Delicious, digg, Google News, Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube, etc. or from a list provided by you or from your RSS feed(s).

6) Animoto

Ready to ditch slideshows altogether? Animoto blends images and music together using motion graphics, effects and transitions to create videos of your imagery using their patent-pending "Cinematic Artificial Intelligence" software,which analyzes the pictures and music that you input and decides on the proper effects and transitions to match both. The end result is better for sharing your photos and not as good for professional presentations, but we can still imagine a few good business uses for this technology. For example, the Animoto video could be used to kick off another presentation or speech. (Read our full review here).

Now Share Them!

Thanks to online slideshow web apps like  and Zoho Show and Google Docs, slideshows can be created, edited, and viewed online. For sharing with others, though, the popular "YouTube for presentations" web site, SlideShare, is a great choice. Here, you can upload your slideshows for everyone to see, download, or embed, depending on how you set the permissions.

If done well, slideshows don't have to be boring - they can both entertain and inform. And it's a lot easier to get your message across when everyone isn't sleeping through your presentation, isn't it?

iLovePhotos is desktop software for the Mac only (Windows version coming...well...maybe one day). Designed to compete primarily with iPhoto , iLovePhotos aims to make it easier to organize and share your photos with family and friends.

According to the company, the software "automatically detects the faces of individuals in each picture." That's true to a point, but that statement implies that the software is recognizing faces and associating names to go along with them after an initial bit of training. At least, that's what we think "facial recognition" should mean. But that is not the case with iLovePhotos.

Instead, iLovePhotos recognizes the faces of various people in a photo and draws a box around them. Then, in a special view (the "tagger" view) which displays just the faces, you can identify a face as belonging to a name and then quickly tag the rest of the faces that are of that same person. But get this straight - it's you that's doing the tagging, not iLovePhotos. The software just has an interface that makes that process less painful than before.

Facial Recognition in iLovePhotos

Besides people's names, photos can be tagged with other words, too, like "vacation," "beach," "dogs," "party," "wedding," etc., just as you would any photo on flickr. Tagged collections of photos are represented with an image of your choosing and display in the right sidebar of the app. After you've tagged your photos, you can easily pull up all the photos associated with that tag by dragging and dropping the photo representing that tag into the toolbar at the top of the app. Drag other tags alongside it to narrow your results. For example, drag a tag for a person and a tag for an event into the toolbar and the app displays all the photos of that person at the event.

But Sharing Is Automatic!

The tagging aspect to iLovePhotos is easier than in some other applications, but it's not ideal. Automatic facial recognition would be so much better. They tell us that they hope to include that in a later release, though.

Something that is automatic about the app is its sharing feature. You can specify that all photos with a particular tag are automatically emailed - you don't have to do anything beyond the initial configuration. Now that's an automated feature we like.

Setting Up Sharing

Slideshows Are Automatic, Too...And Smart

Finally, the software creates personalized "intelligent" slideshows which can be embedded on any site or watched on your iPhone, iPod, or AppleTV. These slideshows use an algorithm to determine what photos you haven't seen lately and displays them for you. If you have just uploaded new photos, you may see those in the slideshow, but even if your collection has been static for a while, the app knows to show you those photos you haven't seen for some time.

Would You Use It?

Because your computer is often the midway point between camera and cloud, desktop software for organizing your photos can still be a useful tool. But does iLovePhotos offer enough features to make it something you would want to try? Let us know what you think.