Mark's ShowMaker to Sony Photo Frame Slideshow Exporter

tospf: Mark's ShowMaker to Sony Photo Frame Slideshow Exporter

Now supports the FDL-1500MX1 Memory Stick Television.

This nifty utility exports ShowMaker™ slideshow projects to your Sony® PHD-A55 Digital Photo Frame (aka CyberFrame), Sony® FDL-1500MX1 Memory Stick Television (or similar products) quickly and easily with no manual intervention. Freed from the constraints of the manufacturer supplied software, you can unlock the true potential of these great devices. If you have one of these Photo Frames, you will love this tool.

Why do I care?

Do you want to create slide shows for your computer, a CD-ROM, your web site AND your Sony Photo Frame while only arranging the pictures ONCE?
Do you want your pictures to fill the whole screen of your Photo Frame?
Do you want to include in your slideshow synthetic images, such as titles, generated by popular software like Adobe PhotoShop and Illustrator and Corel PhotoPaint?
Do you want to maintain the quality of your pictures?
Do you want to minimize the number of Memory Sticks™ you need to buy by shrinking all your pictures to the size of the Picture Frame screen as they are exported?

If you answered yes to any of the above, you need tospf™.

What Does tospf™ Do?

tospf™ reads a ShowMaker project file and creates a set of picture files in a specified destination folder (or directly in a Memory Stick™)* in the format required by Sony Digital Photo Frame products. The files have names numbered in the order the pictures appear in the ShowMaker slideshow. A Sony Digital Photo Frame will display these files in the same order as the original ShowMaker slideshow. tospf™ scales all the pictures to the size of the PHD-A55 or FDL-1500MX1 screen to minimize file size and the number of Memory Sticks™ you must buy.

tospf™ can optionally crop pictures, with aspect ratios different than the Digital Photo Frame's 1.33:1, to remove the need for black borders. The cropping features are useful if dislike black borders and your camera takes 1280x1024 images (which many do) or you want to include pictures from Kodak Picture Disks. This feature is particularly useful because the PHD-A55 displays 1280x1024 images as small pictures, about half the size of its screen, centered in its screen.

Best of all tospf™ requires no manual intervention. A 500-slide show can be exported in just a few minutes.

tospf is smart. It minimizes the processing it performs on an image. When the input file is in JPEG format and already fits the Picture Frame screen, only the file format is changed. The image is not decompressed and recompressed or processed in any way. The format required by the Sony Digital Photo Frame, which Sony coyly refers to as "Memory Stick Format" is actually the EXchangeable Image File (EXIF) format used by nearly all digital cameras. When the input file is already in EXIF format all the meta information stored in the format, e.g. picture taking time and camera settings, is preserved.

Both command prompt and GUI versions are included in the package.

* Requires a MemoryStick adapter to connect the MemoryStick to your computer

How Do I Use tospf™?

GUI Version

Normally launched from the Start Menu, the GUI is the easier way to use tospf™.

tospf GUI

Simply browse to and select the ShowMaker project file and browse to and select your desired Output Folder, then click the "Generate Show" button. The current option settings are displayed in the GUI panel and can be easily changed.

Command Prompt

Simply type the following command in a command prompt or Run window:

tospf <options> srcproj ... destdir

srcproj is the name of the file where you saved your ShowMaker project. If you enter more than one project, the pictures will be concatenated in the output.

destdir is the name of the location where you want the output files written.

Options

Please see Options Section in the tospf™ Help Documentation to learn about the options.

Where Can I Find More Information?

Please read the complete Help Documentation which is available on-line.

What Versions of ShowMaker Does tospf work with?

tospf works with the Trial, Standard and Pro versions of ShowMaker.

Why Not Use the Picture Gear Software Supplied With the PHD-A55?

Picture Gear version 3 supplied with the author's PHD-A55 has the following problems:

It does not display pictures as a slideshow on your PC. If you want a show on your PC too, you must arrange the pictures in your slideshow software AND in Picture Gear. Ouch!
Picture Gear does not do any cropping or scaling. If you want to perform these operations, you must use another software package then bring the images into Picture Gear. Ouch!
Picture Gear decompresses and recompresses your JPEG files when converting them to "Memory Stick" (actually EXIF) format. In doing so it nearly doubles the size of the JPEG files, forcing you to buy more Memory Sticks.
PictureGear's decompression and recompression also reduces the quality of your pictures?
PictureGear often numbers the output files in a different order from your carefully arranged sequence. I.e. it's buggy.

The most recent version of Picture Gear the author has seen is version 5. This is greatly improved over version 3. Nevertheless producing a show for the Digital Photo Frame still requires much manual time-consuming work. The following improvements have been noted in version 5:

It can create slideshows for a PC and photo albums for the web. Unlike ShowMaker, it does not create autoplaying CD-ROM's of your slideshows.
You can now resize and rotate images but you must do them manually one at a time and must save the modified picture before converting to "MemoryStick" format when potentially you make yet another copy of the image.

The author has not used PictureGear 5 so can offer no insights as to whether it does a better job of the format conversion or is less buggy than version 3. The author does not know which version of PictureGear currently ships with a PHD-A55.

Limitations

No transitions. Transitions are not supported by the Sony PHD-A55 Picture Frame.
No audio. It is not clear whether audio attached to image files is supported by the Sony PHD-A55. The author has not yet had time to experiment.
No autotext. Autotext is not added to the pictures. There would be no way to turn it off.
No thumbnails. tospf does not create a thumbnail (small copy of the main image) within the files it exports. This does not cause any problems.

Current Version

Version 1.03

Trademarks

tospf is a trademark of Edgewise Consulting.
ShowMaker is trademark of dmagic, Demmark.
Sony is a registered trademark of Sony Corporation. Memory Stick is a trademark of Sony Corporation.

Price and Ordering Information