Web album / slideshow tool?

[J]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 14:54, Patton Echols <p.echols at comcast.net> wrote:
> In about a week's time I will have to produce a "photo book" to be
> placed on a thumb drive and handed off.  By photo book, I mean something
> that can display a slideshow and is platform independent, and needs no
> network.  I will be working under some significant time constraints:

Hope they're paying well for all that...

> Photos will be taken at an event by several photographers.  I will be
> give the cards and have to sort through and pick 20 to 40 of the photos,
> organize them on the thumb drive and give to the recipient within a
> couple of hours.  (It could be 4, I expect 2, and I may be told I get 50
> minutes!)

Really?  I REALLY hope they're paying you well for that then... I'd
require at least a week to organise and pick through images from
multiple sources.  Though that isn't your question...

> One solution is to just put the photos in place and the end user can
> just use whatever viewer they have available.  Not very elegant.  I'd
> like to do better.

A little google goes a long way ;-)  Here ya go:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=521885

There are a few suggestions in there... Digikam and Inkscape are two
of them...  but Digikam and some of the others are probably what you
want.

Also, not mentioned in there, I think is the swftools package...

That includes a couple things:

gif2swf and jpeg2swf which takes a list of image files and makes a
very basic swf slideshow.

Honestly, given your time constraints, I'd just put whatever the
images are you pick in a dir, convert them all to jpg and use jpeg2swf
and throw them all in a slideshow quickly.

But that's just me and because I think the time constraints are a bit
unreasonable ;-)

Of course you could also add images one at a time in Pitivi and then
add an audio track so there's at least some music to go along with the
images...