Gail On Tech

Create free travel slideshows with the wow factor

TripAdvisor is one of my favourite travel sites and I never book a hotel without first checking out the member reviews and ratings and the real-life candid photos of rooms to see whether they bear any resemblance  to the glam shots on the hotel Web sites.

Now there’s another reason to visit: TripWOW! . This new feature lets even the least tech-savvy person create impressive slideshows of their travel photos in minutes, complete with special transitions, music, maps and titles.

You can source photos from your Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or TravelPod account, or you can upload images from your hard drive. You then give your slideshow a name, upload a profile picture, drag and drop your photos into the desired order, add captions, and nominate where you started your journey and the city your photos are from.

Next up, you can choose from the music on offer or upload your own, pick one of the two themes (‘passport’ and ‘space’), then preview your slideshow.

Once completed, click on Done and choose whether or not you want to edit it in the future or not — best to choose the future edit option, because you never know what you might want to do down the track. You can then share a link to your slideshow with friends and family — and they’re sure to be impressed! Unfortunately, you can’t download your slideshow until 20 people have viewed it, but you get a link so you can view it yourself until you reach that mark.

This Web-based service is totally free and there’s no need to register to use it.

I quickly whipped up a slideshow with pics from my recent holiday to Greece and Turkey. It uses the ‘space’ theme. Check it out by clicking here.

TripWOW!