Phoenix Slides For Mac

You can start a slideshow using Photos fairly easily, but it’s still more complicated than just opening an image folder and starting it up. And if the images in question aren’t in your Photos library, you have to go through the process of importing them first, which you might not even want to do.

Phoenix Slides makes it quite a bit easier to start and control slideshows. You just navigate to a folder, or drop it in the main UI, and click a button. The controls are straightforward, and it comes with some advanced functionality as well.

Navigating to an album’s location can be more difficult, but it’s much easier to just drag and drop the folder in the main window. The app will automatically navigate to its location and allow you to start the slideshow.

Once launched, there are several ways to navigate: left and right click, the mouse wheel, or the arrow keys. F flips images, while R rotates them. And if you press numbers from 1-9, it will auto-advance after that number of seconds.

Images are pre-cached, which leads to very quick loading times. Small images can be scaled up, larger ones can be shown at their actual size, and JPEG images can be losslessly transformed in various other ways.

There are a number of other useful shortcuts you can use, and the easiest way to learn them is to press H or ? during a slideshow. These range from zooming and scaling to toggling filenames and assigning images to groups.

You can also send images to Trash directly from the slideshow just as you would in Finder, which is very useful when weeding out bad photos from an album.

While it may look very basic at first glance, Phoenix Slides is a very versatile app, though it might take a while for you to familiarize yourself with its range of hotkeys. But if you’re a fan of keyboard shortcuts, it’s the perfect slideshow app for you.