Preparing Your Photos

In general, you do not need to spend much time in preparing your photos. All templates can take both the landscape and the portrait photos. We recomend you use JPEG photos in around 512 to 1024 pixels. Because all of your photos are read into the memory the same time, using JPEG images can take advantage of reading a small version for thumbnails and large/full version for photos in focus. Therefore, you can include more photos without running out your computer resource. There is no limit on number of photos you can hang in the 3D space. But you'll need to make a balance for the performance issue. Typically, you can have around 50 photos for a satisfactory real-time performance with a good graphic card. The real-time performance is not an issue if you goal is to create a video.

Photos in extream proportions such as very wide or very tall ones should be avoided.

Arrange Photos

During camera movement, photos may occationally get overlaped or obscured by each other. If this happens, try in Layout tab to increase the Spacing or Layer Offset, and decrease the randomness of the position, size, and depth.

Add Opening and Ending Images in TDTMontagePS0001, TDTMontagePS0003~TDTMontagePS0011

You can use one image for opening and one image for ending. If the image is a portrait image or a very tall image, the scrolling effect will be automatically added, otherwise, a simple fade-in-fade-out efffect is applied to a lanscape image. You can use a text image with transparenct background for opening and ending. To pick your own image, in Elements tab, select the Opening Image or the Edning Image entry, then click the image thumbnail (it was initially blank) to select the image. To select your own image, click the From File in the dialog and locate your image folder using the file directory tree at the left.

Add Opening and Ending Images in TDTMontagePS0002 and TDTMontagePS0012

You can use more than one image for the opening and the ending in these two styles. The selected images will use either fade-in-fade-out animation or scrolling animation depending on the animation mode you choose. To add your own images, create a set of images that you want to show - better to be PNG images with transparent background. To pick your own images, in Elements tab, select the Opening Image or the Edning Image entry, then click the Load image... button. In the dialog, drag images to the bottom slot to include more images; or drag the images in the bottom slot to the outside to remove images.

Create Highllight Images

Optionally you can use two sets of images: one is the original set and the other is the highlight set in which you can set highlight, text, contrast, effect, etc. Each style allows you to add headline animation, opening and ending show with fading or scrolling animation. Do do so, simply create a subfolder in your selected photo folder. Renmae the subfolder to highlight. Make a copy of all you photos that you need to have a highlight into this sub folder. Then edit the copied images in any creative way you want, for exmaple, add text, highlight a persion, and create a spot light effect. The highlight photo should have the same file anme as the original one.

Interactive Control

You can use the template for an interactive show. Press the "s" key to pause/continue the animation; Press the arrow keys to backward/forward a photo; and Press the Enter key to show/hide the photo thumbnail panel. In the thumbnail panel, you can pick a photo to show.