How To Create a Real Time Photo Slideshow At Your Wedding
Today's tip comes from friend of Snapm, Ben Dodson, who wanted to contribute a little extra something to his friend's wedding day. What Ben did, with relatively little work, was set up a live slide show of pictures taken by the guests of the wedding playing on a screen at the wedding itself. In Real Time.
The secret to making this happen is the use of a great new piece of technology called the Eye-Fi card. What Eye-Fi has done is create SD cards with wifi built in. When you buy the card, you set it up to share your photos instantly with your computer and any service you choose (Picasa, Flickr, etc). In order to utilize this at an event like a wedding, we recommend the following steps:
- Gather 4+ digital cameras from family members and volunteers. You may want to slap a big orange sticker on them to indicate that they are the public cameras and should be used freely by guests of the event.
- Buy an Eye-Fi card for each camera. Prices start at $49.99.
- Configure the cards to send their photos to the same folder on the same computer.
- Hook this computer up to a projector at the venue and have it continuously running a slideshow of images from the shared folder.
You'll want to make sure your venue either has wireless or you can set up a wireless network yourself from your laptop if you're technically savvy.
That's about it. If you have any success stories be sure to let us and the Eye-Fi folks know.
