25+ Excellent Free Slideshow Solutions to Enhance Your Portfolio

Portfolio websites and blogs are critical for freelance designers to build an online presence and to tease potential customers to buy their services.

Many designers have learned this and this means the competition is hard. That is why portfolios simply need to be awesome and stand out from all the others to be noticed and generate business. An important aspect of portfolios is presentation of the designers work and this is where slideshow applications comes in handy.

They look good, improve usability and gives visitors to the portfolio simple access to the material being presented. This post brings an overview of more than 25 excellent slideshow solutions to enhance your portfolio.

If you like jQuery plugins too, and javascript in general, make sure to check out the thousands of fully-licensed scripts found over at Envato Market.

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Hosted Embeddable Slideshow Applications

Flash Gallery

Flash Gallery is a free application that allows you to create a slideshow on your website easy and fast. You won’t need any programming skills to install or use it. Just embed it into your website and script will automatically form a slideshow from a specified folder or from Flickr photostream. Creates Slideshow automatically (scans specified folder for images, creates thumbnails and uses filenames for titles). It also supports Flickr photostream

PhotoSnack

PhotoSnack is a web application that lets you create photo slideshows and online photo galleries for free. It is a hosted solution that generates slideshows from photos you upload to your account. PhotoSnack also offers you multiple ways of sharing and publishing your photo slideshows. You can upload multiple photos at once. You can create as many slideshows as you like with unlimited storage.

There are many configuration options and they all look pretty good and you can easily embed the slideshows into your website or blog with the embed function.

Slide.com

Slideshows on slide.com allows you to create awesome flash based slideshows using images from most of the popular social network sites and to customize the look and feel of your slideshow from a range of preset configurations. Slideshows are hosted and can be easily embedded and shared on popular network sites like facebook, myspace etc.

You can add music, video, apply transition effects and select between several skins and themes. Below you can see how a flower themes looks (flowers flying around…)

Flash Based Slideshow applications

SimpleViewer

SimpleViewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewing application. Lightweight and easy to use, it features smart preloading, a resizable interface, thumbnail menu and optional description text. It uses XML to pull in images from a web directory (or Flickr if configured) and display them as a Flash presentation. You can incorporate captions and links for each image. It is simply amazing, and can generate a stunning visualization of your portfolio that is sure to impress.

Simpleviewer also provides other excellent viewers that is worth investigating.

AutoViewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewer. AutoViewer is designed to display a linear sequence of images and captions.

TiltViewer is a free, customizable 3D Flash image viewing application.

3D Curve Wall

3D Curve Wall for thumbnail gallery powered by Papervision3D, ActionScript 3 and XML

Polaroid Gallery

Polaroid Gallery is a free, opensource flash gallery, the script loads images and image titles dynamically from an external XML file or a flickr RSS feed. Then the script processes the data and creates an interactive flash gallery.

JavaScript Based Slideshow Applications

MiniShowcase Gallery

Minishowcase is a small and simple php/javascript online photo gallery, powered by AJAX that allows you to easily show your images online, without complex databases or coding, allowing to have an up-and-running gallery in a few minutes. Images can be viewed in a lightbox way, easier and more precise, with a convenient integrated thumbnail menu. You don’t have to worry anymore about creating your images’ thumbnails. Let minishowcase take care of it!

DevKick Galleria

Galleria is a javascript image gallery written in jQuery. It loads the images one by one from an unordered list and displays thumbnails when each image is loaded. It will create thumbnails for you if you choose so, scaled or unscaled, centered and cropped inside a fixed thumbnail box defined by CSS. The core of Galleria lies in it’s smart preloading behaviour, snappiness and the fresh absence of obtrusive design elements. Use it as a foundation for your custom styled image gallery.

ImageFlow

ImageFlow is an unobtrusive and user friendly JavaScript image gallery. For more information about ImageFlow read the features list, take a look at the documentation and check the blog.

ZenPhoto

Zenphoto is a gallery CMS that just makes sense and doesn’t try to do everything and your dishes. Actually Zenphoto is more than just a gallery for images! It also features multimedia support for audio and video and is even capable of running your entire portfolio website including a news section (blog) and custom pages. This makes Zenphoto the ideal CMS for illustrators, artists, designers, photographers, film makers and musicians.

JonDesign’s SmoothGallery

Using mootools v1.11, this javascript gallery and slideshow system allows you to have simple and smooth (cross-fading…) image galleries, slideshows, showcases and other cool stuff on your website. JonDesign’s SmoothGallery is designed from the ground up to be standard compliant: You can feed it from any document, using custom css selectors. And even better, this solutions is very lightweight: The javascript file is only 24kb. It’s free as in beer and even better, this library is open-source, GPL licensed to be precise.

Galleriffic

Galleriffic is a jQuery plugin that provides a rich, post-back free experience optimized to handle high volumes of photos while conserving bandwidth. Thumbnail navigation (with pagination). API for controlling the gallery with custom controls. Keyboard navigation. jQuery.history plugin integration to support bookmark-friendly URLs per-image. Graceful degradation when javascript is not available.

TripTracker

The TripTracker slideshow is a lightweight JavaScript image viewer with an animated slideshow feature. The viewer is free to use in personal or commercial web pages, provided that the script is not sold or exchanged for profit.

Barack Slideshow

This slideshow is very elegant with a menu showing current location.

jQuery SlideViewer

SlideViewer is a lightweight (1.5Kb) jQuery plugin which allows to instantly create an image gallery by writing just few lines of HTML. SlideViewer checks for the number of images within your list, and dynamically creates a set of links to command (slide) you pictures. Also, clicking on each image will make the gallery slide to the next picture. You can optionally customize the kind of animation and its duration and also enhance(*) the default tooltips with some fancy tooltips.

S3Slider jQuery plugin

JQuery Slideshow with three different features and displaying sides, fully customizable sizes, delay speed and with good documentation.

qGallery

qGallery is a simple to use prototype based gallery script. All image processing is done by the script so you don’t have to worry about the images you upload on the server. All images for the skimmer graphics and the fullsize view will be created on the fly and stored in a cache directory on the server to save processing power on the server.

HighSlide JS

Highslide JS is an open source JavaScript software, offering a Web 2.0 approach to popup windows. It streamlines the use of thumbnail images and HTML popup’s on web pages. Great compatibility and safe degrading. If the user has disabled JavaScript or is using an old browser, the browser redirects directly to the image itself or to a given HTML page. Lots of configuration options and scalability without compromising on simplicity. A component system lets you strip away unused features down to a filesize of 10kB.

jqGalScroll

jQuery Gallery Scroller (jqGalScroll) takes list of images and creates a smooth scrolling photo gallery scrolling vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The plugin will also create pagination to allow you to flow through your photos.

You can also take a look at our article: 35 wordpress photography website templates.

Lars

Lars started tripwire magazine back in January 2009. He is really passionate about web design, web development and loves to look into new technologies, techniques, tools etc. and to write articles for his readers.