If you’re as mesmerized by exploring some of the Photosynth collections as we are, you might be interested to know that there’s a hidden autoplay function in Photosynth.  Launch any collection, then press the “1” key. Every 7 seconds Photosynth will advance to the next image in a tour that will take you through every photo in the set. Clicking anywhere interrupts the tour, but you can use your mouse wheel to zoom while the tour is going on if you like. You can almost run it as a screensaver... just maximize IE using F11 and minimize the sidebar tab and the application will fill your screen.

There’s even a back door to control the transition time. If you add an “&autoPlayInterval=5000”  argument to the end of your URL, you get a slide show that transitions every 5000 milliseconds, or 5 seconds. (The minimal legal value for this parameter is 3000). Here’s a sample URL: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/view.html?collection=FaiginGallery/index1.sxs&autoPlayInterval=5000

Be careful – watching Photosynth do its thing can seriously impact your productivity.

Cheers,

David Gedye
Seadragon and Photosynth Group Manager

Live Labs | Microsoft