Programming Art Forums: Creating slide show archives

Hi,

I am looking for a way to make slide show archives in a way that they will be modifiable and useful many years from now.

---Shows exported for burning to a CD are not modifiable.
---Shows not exported are dependent on absolute paths.
---Absolute paths require no change in volume name, user name, or file structures that are set up in the OS install.
---A show, with its images could be archived to a CD but would probably not be playable on another Mac years from now.

I think that I am suggesting an enhancement-- That your program will internally choose between absolute paths for images (that start with the volume name) and relative ones (that are relative to the path for the .sld file.) You could store the path for the .sld in the .sld. And then when your current code fails to find an image, you construct the relative path and try it.

Relative paths would enable users to make archives of their slide shows on a CD. The archive could be played from the CD or the files copied to any location on any volume and played so long as a folder containing the .sld and its images was moved around without disturbing the contents.

Just thoughts for future work

If there is a good way to archive that I am missing-- I would appreciate the knowledge.