Story Time

With all modern phones equipped with powerful cameras, it’s normal you end up with a vast collection of pictures on your PC. These can all be bundled into neat presentations to play on other computers. A suitable example here is Story Time, letting you build neat movies out of picture galleries and custom audio input.

It takes a little while before you can take the application for a spin, since the installer is done before you realize. With the main window up, all controls become available in plain sight, including a large preview area updating in real time. The rest of the space is fitted with two timeline controls for audio and video input.

The application can only process picture files, which need to be imported from the File menu because drag and drop is not supported here. Sadly, there’s no visual playlist to manually select and analyze each picture, unless scrolling through them in the preview area.

Be sure to also add an audio layer, or at least uncheck the audio component from the set of options. Otherwise the possibility to export is grayed out, and you might end up scratching your head for a while. However, audio input needs to come from instant recording, with the lack of support for existing files, or an option to export the audio layer separately.

Export, on the other hand comes in two forms. There’s the possibility to generate a MOV slideshow with the set of pictures, but with no configurable timer or effects. The second options is to export an XML script suitable for editing in case you want to integrate the slideshow in other projects.

To sum it up, Story Time isn’t quite your regular slideshow maker. This is mostly because of the lack of any editing options, and poor support for exporting. On the other hand, it can be used to generate XML scripts, but other programs are required for further editing.