Please help me make photo slideshow usable

[wildgoose]

After returning from a trip, I decided to finally try my Sage HD300's photo viewing capabilities on my big screen TV to view the trip photos.

Unfortunately, it looks like even the developers didn't try out the feature, perhaps just implemented them according to some marketing spec and leave it at that.

We have lots of photos, and I like to view them relatively fast, like when I flip through them on the computer. Even if I set the slide show internal to 1 sec (the minimum), it takes way longer than that for it to go to the next slide (more like 5+ seconds, I am using 7.0 and a Core-i7). I tried to tweak all the settings, but the interval feels just a little bit too long.

Then I tried the next best thing, view them manually instead of relying on a slide show. This is where it REALLY showed no one actually used the feature on a real TV, or at least a monitor bigger than 20".

I press a button on the remote to advance to the next photo. Instead of simply show the next photo, it goes through this fancy transition of sliding the existing photo to the right (or is it left?), and show the new photo sliding into view from the other side. Yes, all sounds great on paper, but my wife and I started to have severe headache after viewing about 10 photos. The constant shifting of photos from left to right will make you dizzy in no time.

We got so frustrated we gave up and went back to the computer to view the photos.

My old WDTV which I've sold, have a very simple but effective slide show implementation. Simply shows the next photo within about 2 seconds. Nothing fancy, but works, and doesn't make me feel dizzy or gives me headaches..

So my questions are:

1) what am I doing wrong in slide show option? What do I need to do so that the photo displays for 1 second, then advances to the next photo?

the HD300 is connected to the Sage Server running on my Corei7 machine which has the photos on a local HD.

2) how do I disable the useless transition effect when I step through the photo manually?

Thank you!

[crusing]

While in Photos hit the option button and you can disable transitions in the slide show options menu. The HD300 can't seem to handle the transitions smoothly.

[wrems]

I just checked my HD200 in relation to navigation speed with photos, your HD300 should be as fast if not faster... I'd say average 1 second between the time I press the remote until the next picture snaps into place. A few here and there take maybe up to 2 seconds. I do have the transitions turned off. Have you generated thumbnails?

[wildgoose]

Thank you for your reply. I am going to try it again tonight and report back with more details.

[wildgoose]

Ok, I tested it again last night and was able to get it to work! I disabled transitions, but it didn't take effect immediately for stepping through unless I restart the slide show...

Now the timing seems to be more/less correct. I set slide show to 2 sec and it does do the right thing. The timing of the first few slide show were not perfect but after a few slides it works fine.

I am not sure what happened the first time i tried it and why it took so long... I clearly remember I set the timing to 1 sec. Perhaps i didn't restart the slide show so it never took effect?

The default pan/fade transition works quite well for horizontal photos. For vertical photos, the transition from top to bottom or vice versa is a bit too much/fast. For fade transition, it works well except when it switches to the next slide, the current image feels 'stuck' for split of a second (lack of a better description but the transition at that moment is less smooth..)

I tweaked with the menu setting, 8 columns and 5 rows, without the filename display seems to work well on my TV, and I took the plunge and gave Sage access to all my digital camera photos. It was a joy browsing through the photos on the big screen TV.