Picture and Sound Show

Picture and Sound Show is a lightweight software application that helps you create screensavers using a personalized collection of images and songs, applying transition effects, and including picture captions and background patterns.

The GUI coincides with the configuration panel and employs a multi-tabbed environment for categorizing the suite of settings.

Although it integrates a bunch of tweaking options for controlling the pictures, sound, transitions, and captions, the layout looks clean and easy to digest. The program’s configuration settings can be accessed via the Screen Saver panel integrated in Windows.

Picture and Sound Show gives you the freedom to generate multiple slideshows. It keeps track of all of them with the aid of a simple list and allows you to delete or disable the selected one, activate a slideshow every hour, day, week, month, or year, and automatically switch from one screensaver to the next, previous or a random one in the list.

Plus, you can export the slideshows as screensavers, save them on your system to SCR file format, copy picture and sound files into the screensaver data files, and password-protect the screensaver.

The application helps you add different pictures from your computer (JPEG, GIF, PNG, ICO, BMP), import photos from a user-defined folder, preview each picture, delete items, as well as arrange files in the preferred order by moving them up or down.

What’s more, you can add songs (WAV, MIDI, MP3, SND, AU, AIFF) and listen to them directly in the main window using the basic audio player that allows you to stop or pause the audio selection.

When it comes to image tweaks, the tool lets you pick the photo position (e.g. centre of screen, random position), adjust the size, as well as display items in a sequential or random order, shuffle pictures, or show them by filename, size or date.

Images can be automatically changed at regular or random time intervals or manually modified upon mouse or keyboard actions. Songs can be played in a random order, synchronized with the next picture change, and extended with periods of silence.

Picture and Sound Show comes with a large collection of transitions that can be applied for stylizing your slideshows, such as box in or out, vertical or horizontal split, left or right wipe, clockwise or anti-clockwise radar, random horizontal and vertical lines. You can adjust the speed of transitions and preview them.

Image captions can be placed below or above the picture, at the bottom or top of the photo, and may include filename, path, extension and custom text. The text may be altered in terms of font, font style, size and color. Advanced options allow you to change the background color, apply background patterns (tile, borders), and exit the screensaver upon mouse or keyboard actions.

Picture and Sound Show proves to be a handy screensaver tool and packs an impressive number of configuration settings that can be used for customizing slideshows in detail. The only problem is that the utility hasn’t benefited from updates from a long time so you can make use of its capabilities especially if you are the owner of an old operating system, such as Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 or XP.