Animoto

Today I discovered Animoto, an online service that produces something rather special – slideshows from your photographs that aren’t boring.

It couldn’t be easier to use. You upload some images, select (or upload) some music and away it goes, analysing everything and producing an animated show in time to the music. There’s noting else to configure, but every time you run it you get a different result, so if you don’t like the result, just run it again.

Non-commercial, 30 second slideshows are free. Full length ones (up to about 10 minutes) are $3 each, or $30 for a year’s subscription. Commercial use licenses are $99 for three months or $249 for a year – not cheap, but does allow the creation of DVDs and all the number crunching is done on the Animoto servers.