Once upon a time if you wanted to display a folder full of holiday snaps stored on your laptop on your TV you had to grapple with wires or make some kind of DVD slideshow. All required effort.
Then the Google Chromecast arrived.
PictaCast is a new Chrome App that lets you seamlessly send a slideshow of photos stored on your hard drive to your big screen television using Chromecast.
Multiple folders and image sources can be added, and you have control over the speed of playback, what order they play in and the way they’re displayed.
One particularly neat feature of this implementation is that it also lets you specify an MP3 file to accompany your slideshow. Currently this only works when casting from Windows, Mac or Linux but not Chrome OS. Hopefully it won’t be too long before Chromebooks can join in the fun.
You can also choose whether to overlay the current time or the file name of the image being shown.
PictaCast is a freemium app available from the Chrome Web Store. Free users are limited to a casting session of just 30 minutes a day. The full version can be purchased from the store for £1.89/$2.99.