Digital Home Thoughts: Your Photos + MTV = Animoto

"Picture 487 of your Jamaican vacation photos fading by as some Caribbean muzac plays in the background. Yeah, photo slideshows can be kind of a snore. The solution? Animoto! Think of it as a little black box filled with film & TV producers, techies, indie rockers, and robots. You put your photos and a song in one end, shake it up, and a photo music video pops out the other end… with pro-level post-production, animated cuts synced to your music’s beat, and oh-so-much style. And it only takes a few clicks. (Really!) The robots do all the work. The 30 second videos are free and they’re perfect for mailing to friends or posting to your blog, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Longer videos cost a few bucks. Special for Photojojo subscribers: Sign up for free by Sunday using this link and the swell lads at Animoto will put a credit in your account for one free full-length video. (It’s okay to tell your friends.)"



I agree that sometimes one needs such tools to break up the monotony of a very large set of images. However, I have started becoming more and more stringent with the photographs that I end up keeping to avoid this exact problem. I have never been a big fan of dressing up the presentation of photographs, I really just prefer going through them one by one and imagining the moments when the photographs were taken. But Animoto does look like a cute tool and is mostly automated so it is very little hassle to get to your videos.