The Slide Show

Menu "Slide Show"

When folders are selected in the dialog "Slide Show…" from the Slide Show menu, Pix starts a slide show displaying all images in these "root folders" in an order determined by Pix's preferences under the "Slide Show" tab:

The order chosen in the radio button group "File Order" applies to the sequence of all files if the "Folder Order" is "None". If the "Folder Order" is not "None", however, then the set of all image files is partitioned into groups, where two files belong to the same group iff they have the same direct containing folder. The files of a group are then displayed contiguously, where the order of the files within such a group is determined by the "File Order", while the order of the groups is determined by the "Folder Order". "Chronologically" means in case of "File Order": according to the creation date of a file, and it means in case of "Folder Order": according to the latest creation date of a contained file.

There is one exception: If the "Folder Order" is "Random" and the folder name does not end with an asterisk (*), then at most one video in this folder is put into the group, the others are treated as if they were contained in individual single-element folders.

When the slide show is running, it can be suspended and resumed by giving the command Toggle in the Slide Show menu. If the slide show window shows a still picture (rather than a video clip), then hitting the space bar on the keyboard does the same. (If a video clip is displayed, then the space bar controls suspension and resumption of the video playback.) The title of the window has a trailing🧍‍♀️symbol iff the slide show has been suspended by the user.

With the menu command Add Folders… the running slide show can be extended to cover more folders. This causes a rescan of all folders used for the slide show.

The Advance and Step Back commands in the Slide Show menu let the slide show jump to the next resp. previous picture. If the slide show window shows a still picture (rather than a video clip), then the '<' and left arrow keys let the slide show jump to the previous picture, most of the other keys tell it to advance.

The images shown in the slide show can also be rotated and regions can be selected and magnified, as described in chapter Single Image View.

You can set the current position of the slide show to an arbitrary element of the slide show collection by using the menu item Go to File…, and to a random one with Go to Random File.

With the menu item Move to Next Screen you can move the slide show window around if you have multiple screens. The menu command Move to Next Free Screen does the same, but skips screens that already host a slide show.

The Delete menu command works similar to the full image window, but rather than closing the window, the slide show is advanced to the image following the deleted one. It is enabled only when the slide show is suspended, in order to prevent inadvertent deletion of a wrong file.

The menu item Reveal Last External Media shows in the Finder the last video file of the slide show that was played using an application different from Pix.

The menu item Task From Last External Media… creates a "task" from the last video file of the slide show that was played using an application different from Pix.

Using the menu item Skip Marked images you can advise Pix to skip marked media, such that those media are not shown in the slide show. Use the same menu item to switch off this behavior. The slide show window has a small red square in its upper right corner iff skipping is switched on. For how to mark/unmark media files see the Image View page.

Last Slide Show starts a slide show with the current configuration (of Pix's settings), iterating over the folders chosen for the most recently previously started slide show.

When a local slide show is finished, Pix stores the respective file sequence in compressed form in a file. If Last Slide Show Using Stored Sequence is chosen, then Pix starts a slide show with the current configuration based on this file sequence, which can be outdated or even not meeting the requirements of the current side show configuration. The advantage is that the file system does not have to be parsed again for assembling the file sequence.

Information in the Slide Show Window

In the upper left corner of the window you see the position of the current media in the slide show, the total number of media files, and the creation date of the current file. After the file list has been built, the text color changes randomly. (Why? Assume that you cannot read the text because it has a color very similar to its background. Then you can just go one step ahead and one step back in the slide show, and you will see the same text over the same background, but written in a color that is probably more distinguished from the background.) Before that, i.e. while the file list is being built, the text is white.

Special File Handling

It sometimes happens that Pix, like the QuickTime Player, can open and play a video, but does so with permuted frames, while the VLC media player plays it correctly (cf. Jerky MP4 videos in iOS native, but not VLC. How to fix?). You can prevent Pix from opening such videos, e.g. in a slide show, by tagging the file in Finder with the "Red" tag. They will then be handled like other files that Pix cannot display: "Do you want to open it in its default application?".

In the preferences, tab "Slide Show", you can configure the slide show to skip video files, still images, or "external" media, i.e. files that the slide show will open in another application.

Remote Slide Show

If you have media on some computer S and want to run a slide show based on this data on a Mac C different from S, such that C is able to establish a network connection to S, then you can use file sharing for accessing the media files on S. This works fine with Pix, but the file sharing itself is notoriously unstable; connections have to be reestablished manually frequently.

That's why Pix has the ability to run a slide show via HTTP. To start it, use the "Remote Slide Show" command in the "Slide Show" menu. There you have to enter an HTTP URL of the form http://S:3005path, where path is the absolute path of the root folder for the slide show on S. For this to work, the HTTP Server of Pix on S has to be running, and on the first connection attempt you will have to allow on S an incoming connection from C.