Slide.Show

I've been playing with some newer web tools lately, including some blog/CMS software (which I'll write about later) and one of my new favorites, a Silverlight-based photo gallery control called Slide.Show. Slide.Show, written by the folks at Vertigo Software, is a highly-configurable control for organizing and displaying photos on the web. It's Silverlight-based, which gives it both great performance, and allowed Vertigo to give it a beautiful UI, and it can use a variety of source for its data, from XML config files (the default) pointing to either local or remote images, or even a flickr account.

Since it's open-source, you can also easily modify it to point to your own preferred data source, via JSON or similar protocols.

Here's an example, featuring some photos I took during a visit to Pike's Place Market in Seattle, as well as some of the great code camp logos and promotional pics created by the Mid-Atlantic Community:

I've got this dropped into my blog via an <iframe> which points to a website I own, so it's pretty easy to drop a gallery in wherever I want one. And since you can configure the data source to point to, say, a web service or HttpHandler, you could use a single page or handler to expose a wide array of galleries and photo albums. Note also that Slide.Show has built-in support for multiple albums per gallery (click the icon with six boxes to view other albums) and full screen viewing (click the blue icon with the arrow).

One area currently lacking with Slide.Show is getting the photos and data file together. Thankfully, there's a free tool available to help with the process. I think that tool's resizing algorithms are a little heavy-handed with the compression, though, so I'm using Prish Resizer to do my resizing, and just using Ben Hoffman's tool for generating the XML data file.

Anyway, if you're looking for a solution for displaying photos on a website or blog, you should take a look at Slide.Show.