Compound slideshow startup

[Peter N]

I am not sure if this is an acceptble suggestion but I'll try it on you all even if it seems a touch disloyal and perhaps even heretical. Sheepishly I have to admit I use Google's Picasa software a great deal for managing my photos and making simple slideshows. It's free and it works and it's quick. Of particular interest to me it has a feature called gift CD which I use for distributing holiday photos among friends; and to make a slideshow digestible for viewers I divide, say, a few hundred pics into several mini-slideshows just by separating the pics into different folders, perhaps, for example, one for each day of shooting or logical subject section. Picasa automatically sizes the pics from my hard disk and burns an autorun CD, leaving the hard disk folders unaltered - very easy - I then just pop it into an envelope and post it. When opened, the viewer is presented with an overlapping collage of the header slides of each folder and by clicking on one of these images the appropriate mini slideshow starts, runs and returns to the title collage ready for "another bite of the cherry".

Somewhere on this forum I have seen a multi-startup feature or menu presented but, if I may say so, as I remember it, it did not have the simple sophistication of Picasa's. Picasa does not of course match PTE's slideshow programming capability and is no rival for presenting photos stylishly.

To come to the point, I think that PTE V5 could be programmed to emulate Picasa's front end, not just for a CD but for any longish slideshow presentation. I am just starting to get to grips with V5 but I know there are several of you out there with programming skills greater than I'll ever have. I wonder if someone would like to have a try and set up a startup template with buttons behind the collage images to set the mini-slideshows into action. I would welcome such a feature very much and it shouls not need any changes to PTE itself. What do you think?