I love the flexibility of Fotomagico but I am tearing my hair out with some of the bugs/issues.
-
The Photo Pile snippet
I could find no way of changing the scale of the photo within each frame. I say “could” because when I just went to recreate the problem I see it is no longer available since the latest update. -
Adding music snippets
This automatically sets all the slides (within the duration of the music) to transition along with the music. I didn’t want that, so selected them all and changed to After duration. But the durations had all been modified to match the music! Net effect… all my carefully set durations were lost. -
Something changed all my image positions!
After spending hours on creating my slideshow, I noticed a few errors in the final output so returned to editing it. When playing back to check the results I noticed one of my slides’ image position was wrong, so I went to correct that. Then discovered quite a lot of the slides have been altered, some so that the images didn’t even cover the slide despite being larger than it — not something I would ever do manually and certainly something I would have noticed had I done it accidentally. -
Video slide timing.
I added a video as a new slide. The video is 176.9s long. I then decided to set in/out points to 0:10 and 2:40 respectively. Now I see the warning triangle which says “The slide is 176.9s long but the video is only 149.5s long” and offers a button to move the end point. I don’t want to do that, so I manually change the slide duration to 149.5s. In my test project, that works. In my real project the warning is still there. It now says “The slide is 150.7s long but the video is 149.5s long”. No, the duration in the options panel still says 149.5. If I keep making changes either manually or clicking the offered button, the numbers just keep changing and the warning never disappears. -
Audio timing
I decided to majorly shorten the above video to 75 seconds (in fact 74.5 - how can I be more precise?) and now the audio track has a warning. The pop-up says “Audio not long enough” and then tells me the selected audio is 305.3s long where the slides are 259.1s long. The first button offers to shorten the audio, the second offers to loop it. My head is spinning. The title and the looping imply the audio is too short. The times and “shorten” button imply the audio is too long! -
The images and videos panels sometimes lose sight of the content in Photos. Just now I added a video to recreate the above problems. When I switched to the Images picker all I got was filenames and blank thumbnails with question marks on them. I had to quit and restart to get them to show up.
-
Previewing of downloaded music snippets fails a lot of the time.
After some time working in my project I tried to sample music snippets by double clicking them. About two thirds of the time they would not play, and sometimes indicate a duration over 175 hours. Having just restarted the app it seems to be reliable right now. -
It is possible to “lose” layers.
Move a layer (e.g. image) into the area around the slide so that its centre is no longer visible. Now pinch to shrink it. The entire item disappears from view and if you click elsewhere you can never get it back. There needs to be a way to select a layer explicitly in the Start or Finish area. -
Adding slides in chapters is inconsistent
Maybe I am doing it wrong, but when I add a chapter snippet I get a 6s title and five 8s slides.If I drag 6 images onto the first placeholder in the chapter, I get five 8s slides and one 14.8s slide. All subsequent adds are at 14.8s. (This figure must come from somewhere because when I first encountered it it was a different number - still not 8s.) -
I just spotted I can add a chapter from the menu, but if the last slide is selected it doesn’t seem to do anything.
I’m sure there are some other niggles I have encountered but these are the ones that are making my task much harder than it needs to be. I’ve only tried to create one slideshow, but it has 183 slides in it and so many of the above issues can be quite painful. Especially numbers 2 and 3!