The Slideshow button (before Workbench and Editor) plays your photos with their saved edits, with music if you want it, and can make the show into an MP4 video.
Photos chooses where they come from: Shown in the Workbench (what its search and filters leave, in its order), Selected in the Workbench, or Open folder (filmstrip). Each photo is made with its saved edits (an unedited negative is shown inverted, as the editor opens it), or as the scan is with With edits off, at the size the stage needs (up to 4K), on a worker thread; the next two are made ahead, so the show does not wait on a RAW decode.
Choose photos... opens a grid of thumbnails (the Workbench's own) with a tick on each: untick a photo to leave it out of the show and of an exported video; Select all, Select none and Invert do what they say. X leaves out the photo on screen and moves on. The count beside the button says how many are left out. Nothing is deleted or changed, and the left-out photos stay left out when you change the source, until you put them back (they are forgotten when EFAS closes).
Each photo for 1 to 120 seconds; Change with a cut or a 0.7 s crossfade; Shuffle (the photo on screen stays up), Loop, Captions (the file name, with the film, roll and day when the Workbench knows them), With edits, and Progress bar: a thin bar along the bottom of the stage that fills as the photo's time runs out, freezes when you pause and carries on from there.
| Key | |
|---|---|
| Space | play / pause |
| Right, Down, Page Down, N | next |
| Left, Up, Page Up, P | previous |
| Home, or the Start over button | back to the beginning: the first photo of the show and the start of the music (playing or paused stays as it was) |
| End | the last photo |
| X | leave this photo out |
| F, F11, double-click | full screen (the stage moves into a black window; Esc leaves; the cursor hides after two seconds) |
| C | captions on / off |
The editor's own keys (arrows stepping the roll, 0-5 rating, R / K / U flags) do nothing while the Slideshow, Maps or Classroom page is up.
Music plays while the show plays, loops, and waits while it is paused; leaving the page stops it. The choices are:
- three built-in pieces, made inside EFAS from sine waves, plucked strings and an electric-piano voice (so there is nothing to license; the same sound each time). They are made the first time you choose one (a few seconds) and kept as WAV files in EFAS's folder: Drifting (60 beats a minute, slow pads, a long reverb), Morning Light (76, plucked arpeggios) and Night Reel (84, a warm lo-fi). Each is a loop that joins up with itself;
- your own .wav and .mp3 files: Add music... copies them into EFAS's folder (
slideshow-music/yours) and lists them as "name (yours)". The file you add from is never touched. Remove deletes only EFAS's copy. A file has to look like a WAV or MP3 and be between 1 KB and 200 MB.
Volume is remembered with the choice. If the music cannot be played (no audio output, or a file the system cannot decode) a note appears beside the music box and the show carries on without it.
Export video... opens a dialog: where to save the .mp4, a size (HD 1280 x 720, Full HD, QHD, 4K), a frame rate (24, 25 or 30), seconds per photo, cut or crossfade, whether to burn the captions in, and the music and its volume. Each photo is fitted into the frame on black (nothing is cropped) and held for its seconds; with Crossfade the first 0.7 s of each photo fade in from the one before, as on screen, so the video is exactly (photos x seconds) long. Photos left out of the show are left out of the video. A photo that cannot be made is skipped and the dialog says so.
- With ffmpeg (found through the path you choose in the dialog, then the PATH, then the
imageio-ffmpegpackage if it is installed) the video is H.264 with the music mixed in as AAC: looped to the length of the video, at your volume, and faded out over its last two seconds. If that ffmpeg has no libx264 it falls back to its MPEG-4 encoder. On Windows:winget install Gyan.FFmpeg. - Without ffmpeg, OpenCV's own MP4 writer makes the video: it plays almost everywhere but uses the older MPEG-4 codec and has no sound. The dialog says so before you start, and again if you chose music.
The video is written to a hidden partial file and renamed when it is finished, so Cancel (or a failure) leaves nothing behind.