The Slideshow effect turns a screen into a rotating information display — announcements in a waiting room, a menu board, event info in a lobby. You build slides in the browser, set how fast they rotate, and leave it in fullscreen.
Before you start
- A screen you can leave on, connected to a computer, tablet, or TV with a browser.
- Your slide content ready — short headers and a line or two of body text each. Long paragraphs do not read from across a room.
- Image URLs or image files, if you want picture backgrounds.
Slides are stored in the browser on the device you build them on. Build them on the device that will actually run the display.
Build your slides
- Open the Slideshow effect. If you have no slides yet, the preview shows No Slides.
- Select Edit Slides in the top-right corner of the preview. The Slide Editor panel opens.
- Optional: pick something from Choose a Template to load a ready-made deck — Clinic Waiting Room and Convention Welcome Loop are both good starting points to edit rather than build from scratch.
- Select Add Slide, then click the new slide in the list to open Edit Slide.
- Fill in Slide header and Slide body.
- Under Background, choose Color and pick a color, or choose Image and either paste an image URL or select Upload Image File. A preview appears once the image loads.
- Select Done, then repeat for each slide. Use the × button beside a slide to delete it.
You'll know it worked when the preview cycles through your slides and a row of dots appears at the bottom — one per slide, with the current one filled in.
Set the timing
Three controls govern rotation:
| Control | Range | Default | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Display Duration | 3–30 seconds | 5 | How long a slide stays fully visible |
| Transition Duration | 0.5–5 seconds | 1 | How long the crossover between slides takes |
| Transition Effect | fade, slideLeft, slideRight, slideUp, slideDown, zoom | fade | The animation between slides |
A slide's full cycle is Display Duration plus Transition Duration. Read your longest slide out loud at a comfortable pace and set Display Duration a couple of seconds above that — for most slides that lands between 8 and 12 seconds, not the 5-second default.
Use fade for anything people read. The slide and zoom transitions draw attention to the movement rather than the content, which suits promotional loops but works against announcements.
Run it unattended
- Select Go Fullscreen.
- Move the mouse away. Controls fade after five seconds and the display is clean.
- In your operating system's power settings, set display sleep to Never and disable the screensaver.
- Leave the browser window on that screen. To return, move the mouse and select Exit Fullscreen, or press Escape.
To go straight to a running display without touching controls — useful for a kiosk or a machine that reboots on a schedule — bookmark the effect URL with #fullscreen on the end and set it as the browser's startup page.
Troubleshooting
My slides are gone after moving to a different computer. Slides live in the browser's local storage on one device. There is no account or cloud sync. Rebuild the deck on the new machine, and avoid private/incognito windows — those discard storage when the window closes.
An image background shows as blank or empty. The URL is not a direct link to an image file, or the host blocks other sites from loading it. Open the URL on its own; if you land on a web page rather than the bare image, it will not work. Right-click the image and copy the image address instead, or use Upload Image File.
A new slide won't save, or slides start disappearing. Local storage is full, usually from uploaded images. Delete unused slides, and resize images to roughly your screen's resolution before uploading rather than using camera-original files.
Text runs off the slide or is hard to read from a distance. Shorten the body text. The layout scales the text you give it; the fix is fewer words, not a smaller font. Aim for a header plus one or two short lines.
The rotation seems to skip or jump. Changing Display Duration or Transition Duration restarts the rotation timer, so the current slide may cut short once. It settles on the next cycle.
Only one slide shows and it never advances. There is only one slide in the deck. The progress dots only appear with two or more slides.
Next steps
For a single scrolling message rather than a deck of slides, use LED Banner. For a timed event countdown on the same screen, see Countdown Timer.