RockYou—Create Dynamic Slideshows with Music for Your Site

April 13th, 2007 | Posted in Blogging 10 Comments »

RockYou, a photo sharing service that compiles your photos into a dynamic slide show set to music, has taken off with my wife, Shannon, and her friends. Instead of posting several pictures on your blog or website, you can create an endless slide show of pictures in one small space. The pictures rotate in a pleasing, dynamic way and can be set to music.

Admittedly, the RockYou site is a bit gaudy, and looks like something that fits into MySpace and other teen-oriented sites, but the effects are truly cool.

Why use RockYou?

The slide show of pictures is more interesting to watch than one or two pictures or even a collage. It gives the effect of a personal movie (esp. with 50+ pictures). When set to music, it almost makes you tear up, reviewing life’s events like that. You can add hundreds of pictures, include captions with each picture, and the show loads instantly.

Shannon was going to use RockYou to create a slideshow of her brother for his sixteenth birthday, but because she wanted a special song (Celine Dion’s “Beautiful Boy”), she created it with Movie Maker and YouTube instead. It’s a neat idea for a birthday gift. (See her tribute to Ryan.) The effects are nearly the same as with RockYou. (RockYou limits the songs you can use.)

Uses of RockYou

I used RockYou to create a short slideshow of the interviewees on the latest podcast on Tech Writer Voices. With better photos, more action shots, and music, it could really be interesting. Think of the possibilities here. You could use RockYou to …

Present highlights of a conference in way that would make the events seem really cool.
Show a process from start to end in an engaging way (rather than a static slideshow).
Warm up an audience while they are waiting for a presentation to begin.
Share a recent trip with a friend without forcing him or her to sit through an hour of you flipping through a photo album.
Memorialize someone who died.
Create an original story told through photos and fun music.
Let others get to know you visually without pasting a million pictures on your site.
Present a portfolio of your achievements in an eye-catching way.
Present the documentation process to a group of non-interested engineers.

Let me know if you have any interesting RockYou slide shows.

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Brian says:

April 13, 2007 at 3:31 pm

Kind of a neat little toy. I like this better than the Flickr one I’ve seen here and there. The slow zoom into each picture looks very classy.

On an unrelated note, literally, what’s up with the “Possibly Related Posts” at the bottom of this post? They’re not related whatsoever. This is a plugin, I take it?

Tom says:

April 13, 2007 at 8:11 pm

Hmmm, yes it’s a plugin. Sometimes they are sorta related.

I think I’m going to have to manually add tags to all my posts and use a different plugin. It’s just not easy to automate these relationships between posts so late in the game.

April 14, 2007 at 1:08 am

By the way, WordPress 2.2, due to be released April 22, will feature built-in tagging support. So although I recognize the need for more accurate related posts, I want to wait to see if the new tagging feature helps with that (or if it makes my existing plugins incompatible).

April 14, 2007 at 8:39 am

This is what’s kept me from using a related posts plugin. Going through my whole back catalogue isn’t a very appealing prospect. However, I definitely see the value in such a feature to encourage readers to stick around a little longer. I think I’ll probably break down and do it some time soon. I’m intrigued by this upcoming tagging feature and will probably hold out until then to act on this.

April 14, 2007 at 9:21 am

Here’s a preview of what it will look like. I’m not sure it will create a Related Posts plugin. Most likely the tags will link to other posts with the same tags. But if a post supports tags in that field, it makes sense for a plugin to use those tags rather than tags entered in a custom keyword field.

By the way, I learned about tagging in the WordPress podcast. Listening to this podcast is a great way to stay updated with WordPress.

jody says:

October 18, 2007 at 11:59 pm

Question. I have talked with some of my friends and for some reason they can see slide shows from www.rockyou.com on myspace and I cannot. I have tried two different browsers and I get the same thing. Its like certain pages I view don’t load everything. Any suggestions????