Posts Tagged → fotomagico

FotoMagico, Revisited


FotoMagico just hit 6.9. Boinx has been quietly shipping updates all year, which is a good excuse to revisit an app I suspect most of you have forgotten about.

For years, I was the designated slideshow person in my family. Weddings, memorials, graduation parties. Someone would hand me a folder full of photos and say “can you put something together for Saturday?” and I would open FotoMagico and get to work. The app made it easy to do the job well: real transitions, precise timing, Ken Burns effects that actually looked intentional, and music sync that didn’t fight you.

At some point I drifted away. The Photos app covers the basics now, and most occasions don’t demand more than that. But “the basics” is a different thing from standing in front of 150 people at a wedding reception with a twelve-minute show on a MacBook.

One piece of practical wisdom I always passed on: tell the family you need the photos a week out, and tell them the show runs about ten minutes. Eight is better. Nobody in the room actually wants a fifteen-minute slideshow. They think they do.

I’m delighted to see version 6 in the wild. The app is still actively developed, still well-designed, and still the right answer when the stakes are high enough to matter.

If you already own FotoMagico 6, the 6.9 update is free. New buyers can grab it on the Boinx developer page.

If there’s a family event coming up and someone’s already started texting you about “the photos,” now you know what to download.

FotoMagico 5

For years I’ve had the reputation in my friend and family groups as being the “slide show wizard”. If somebody’s getting married, or having an anniversary party, or whatever, they always come to me and ask me to put on their slide show.

I always hedge a bit, explaining that it is very time consuming and that if I’m going to do it, they should at least make sure I get extra cake and ice cream. They always agree to my terms.

What they don’t know is that all this time I’ve simply been taking their pictures and dumping them in FotoMagico with some good music. The app does all the work.

Recently Boinx released version 5 of FotoMagico and now I’ll look even better. They’ve now got features like:

* Resolution independence. Your slide show will play on any projector up to 4K

* Adding video

* New slide transitions and better text animation

One of my tricks for weddings is to always get a shot of the bride and groom’s first kiss and then add it to the end of the slide show for the reception. Everybody loves that. Now FotoMagico makes that job easier with a pre-built snippet for just that purpose.

There’s more, like export functions, synchronization with music beats, and other fancy tricks but to me the real value in this app is how easily it makes a great slideshow. Learn more over at Boinx Software.