Sometimes, a click-progression presentation just isn’t practical, and instead, you want a Mac presentation software application that will play a smooth, movie-style slideshow presentation. If this is what you’re looking for, FotoMagico might be the application for you. It has a solid feature set and is quite easy to learn and use, for which it earns our TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award.
Although FotoMagico is missing a few features found in our top Mac presentation software applications, it still has a solid set of tools that make it an option worth considering. You can use it to add standard media files such as photos, video and audio clips to your presentations, but you can’t add info graphics, cookie-cutter shapes or clip art, unless you have saved them as separate image files. Even then, the software adds images as slides rather than adding smaller images in bounding boxes within the slide. This also means that master slides and slide templates are absent, since each slide consists of a photo, video or blank, colored background, with or without text.
Although you can set up slides to transition with a mouse click, the format of the software works better when you set up automatic, timed transitions. As an added bonus, you can set up slides to advance on an audio cue to ensure perfect timing. You can preview the slideshow within the application window, or you can launch the full-screen preview to test your timing. The 16 transition effects are mostly two dimensional, though a few do have 3D effects.
The layers in FotoMagico are fixed. Photos are always on one layer, audio on another, text on a third and so on. The timeline view along the bottom of the application window has a convenient display that shows the different layers that are currently active.
This Mac presentation software has an added bonus that lets you add copyright information, presentation title, author and other information. This info shows up in Spotlight for easy searching on your computer, and it also serves to let others know that your creative work was your own.
A few convenient features make creating your slideshow a bit simpler: You can copy the animation effects from one slide and paste it to other slides by using Ctrl + click to access the menu. If you’re pressed for time, the Instant Slideshow function lets you apply animations to all the slides in your presentation, or only to the selected slides.
Animations include fade, zoom, pan or rotate for videos and photos; text effects are limited to basic formatting options such as bold, underline, alignment, kerning and the like. Video has the added options of trimming the clip’s duration or adjusting its audio volume. Photos also make use of the Ken Burns effect, which utilizes panning and zooming to give static photos a bit more visual appeal. The sliders for these two effects are a bit tricky to use, however, which limits their convenience. Unfortunately, specific object effects like drop shadows are absent, since objects appear as whole slides.
Unfortunately, FotoMagico does not offer many file formats beyond its native FMS format. You can export files as MP4 movies that are optimized for Apple devices, YouTube and other websites, and you can use the software to burn your presentation to a DVD. However, you can’t open or save a project to the common PPT format, which many other Mac presentation software products can do. Though you can’t export your slides as PDF files, you can save them as images, so there is at least one other option for export.
We found FotoMagico to be relatively easy to use. The interface might take some time to get used to for some users, but once you are familiar with the navigation, it’s very simple to use. Drag-and-drop functionality is present, and all the features work as they are supposed to, but no installer assistant is available to help you put the software on your computer.
This Mac presentation software offers some decent help and support options, including an advanced, one-on-one session via remote desktop access; a 45-minute session costs just less than $100. The free support options include an email contact form on the developer’s website, a knowledgebase with a FAQs section, written tutorials, message boards and a useful Apple Help menu. We would have liked to see video tutorials as well, since most other Mac presentation software applications offer that feature.
FotoMagico can serve as a nice backup option if you’re not interested in more-common Mac presentation software. It is also a great option if you want to create movie-style presentations rather than slideshow-style presentations. Its solid feature set and support options make it a definite contender among Mac presentation software, though its lack of file compatibility is a significant blemish.
