[Noah930]

Trying to make a slideshow for a family event (for my daughter) this weekend. It has been super painful.

So easy, supposedly. Yeah, if everything works as it's supposed to. Instead, it's been a slow process figuring out how to get a job done via back door techniques. The photos, the music, the slideshow program itself...

My macbook is about 8 years old, so it's super slow now. It bogs down very easily. But it's got my itunes/music on it, and it has the vast majority of the photos I intend to use. I don't want to use my daughter's computer, otherwise she'll see what I'm making for her. And my son's computer doesn't have an itunes account or any photos. I thought of importing the photos, but the airdrop feature won't work on my computer (don't know why), so picking out the couple hundred photos and transferring them will have to be via thumb drive. Possible, but just takes a little longer. Then his mac doesn't have an itunes account. Ok, so I'll just open up itunes to my account on his computer. But because his computer isn't recognized/designated by itunes under my account, I can't actually access my itunes purchases. Plus, the songs I have imported into my computer via its disc drive don't transfer over. Plus, his laptop doesn't have an internal disc drive (and we don't have an external one to hook up via USB). The fourth macbook in the household (my 1st grader's) is a loaner from school, and doesn't have iphoto loaded on it. So instead of using any of my kids' newer macbooks, I chose to use my own.

About the photos. Most are on my computer. But some are on my phone. OK, just plug the phone into the computer to download the pics, right? So how come not all the photos on my phone show up when I plug it into the computer? There were about 2 or 3 months of photos at the beginning of my phone photos and the most recent 2 months of photos on my phone that don't show up to download. What's up with that? OK, I'll just email those 20 or so pics to myself, and then import them from my email to iphoto. But wait, now Safari on my computer isn't working! It was just working 2 days ago. WTF? So I logged onto my email from my son's computer, downloaded the phone pics I emailed to myself onto his iphoto, and then exported them to a thumb drive, which I then plugged into my computer to import into iphoto.

But I can't access all my photos normally. It only shows them (under "photos") up to mid-2017. Why is that? For the more recent photos (as well as the old ones), I have to go to the "albums" setting. But when using the "create slideshow" feature, when you click on "add photos" it takes you to the pics in the "photos" section, but not the ones in the "albums" section. To add photos to the slideshow from the "albums" section, I have to go to the pics themselves in "albums" and "share" them to the slideshow. OK, small problem, but it still took me a little bit of trial-and-error to figure it out.

But then the photos all add to the end of the slideshow. While playing around on my son's macbook, I figured out how to add a photo to the front, back, or middle of the slideshow, depending on where I left the cursor in the slideshow itself when I added a new photo. Great feature. But how come it doesn't work like that on my computer? They only add to the end of the program. OK, not a problem--I'll just add them to the end, and then click and drag them to whatever order I want them to play. But after I got to about 60 or 70 photos, my computer got so bogged down when moving around photos, it would get into that endless spinning rainbow of death, and I'd have to force-quit. OK, to work around that, I'll just make sure to add the photos in the order I want them to play. I can do that, but it may take a little bit of planning to go back through 8 years of photos and figure out where I want them in sequence before I add them to the slideshow.

But then, Mrs. Noah found some photos on her phone and wanted me to add them in. So I went through the whole rigamarole of having her email them to me, downloading them to my son's computer, exporting them to the thumb drive, and then importing them into my computer. (But how do I tell her I don't like some of the photos?)

It's taken me about 3 nearly sleepless nights this past week, but I think I've finally got the slideshow done for Saturday morning. Now I just have to figure out how to play the thing on a Zoom conference call that's being run by someone else. I'll try to set up a Zoom meeting at home between my kids' computers tonight to see how to play a slideshow from a computer that's not hosting the meeting. Worst case scenario (plan B) is that I download the slideshow to a thumb drive and deliver it to the person running the slideshow so that she can plug it in and play it directly. She's got to live around here...I think.