It’s easy to dismiss digiKam’s slideshow functionality as a feature of no particular use. After all, most photographers prefer to publish their photos using the photo sharing service of their choice. But the slideshow feature can come in handy when showcasing photos on your machine is the only option. Running a simple slideshow in digiKam is as easy as selecting the desired album or pictures and choosing View → Slideshow → All (or Selection). However, digiKam has something even better: using the View → Slideshow → Advanced Slideshow command, you can create rather impressive slideshows with smooth transitions and soundtracks.

The Advanced Slideshow dialog window is split into four sections. In the Main section, you can specify which photos you want to include into the slideshow as well as configure the transition and playback options. Using the available options, you include all photos in the current album, or limit the slideshow only to a specified selection. Choosing the Custom option allows you to hand-pick the photos you want and specify their order. When you choose the photos for the slideshow, digiKam conveniently displays the total number of photos and the slideshow’s duration time based on the delay between images. If you are using a fairly modern machine with a decent card, you can enable the OpenGL transitions in the Video subsection and select the desired transition type from the Transition effect drop-down list in the Playback subsection (the Ken Burns effect is always a good choice). If you don’t use the OpenGL transitions, you can enable options in the Content subsection. Here, you can choose to display a progress indicator, file names, and captions. Enabling the latter allows you to select the font for the captions and tweak its settings.

To spice up the slideshow, you can add a soundtrack to it in the Soundtrack section. You can add as many music files as needed, and the Time comparison subsection displays the current length of the added music tracks and the duration of the slideshow.

Once you’ve configured the slideshow settings, launch it by pressing the Start Slideshow button. And if you need to pause the show, adjust volume, or jump to the previous or next slide, move the mouse to the upper-right corner of the screen to access the slideshow controls.