Alternate Pic View EXESlide is a lightweight free tool which helps you build extremely basic slideshows. And we really do mean “basic”: you can’t annotate an image, add captions or apply effects, and there’s no support for transitions at all.

EXESlide does excel in one area, though – export formats. The program’s slideshows may be limited, but once built they can be saved as self-launching EXEs, screensavers (SCR), Flash animations (SWF), AVI videos and animated GIFs. There are even bonus tools to present individual images as simple games.

Making this happen starts by building a list of the images you’d like to use. You can do this within EXESlide, but a poor interface makes this frustrating in the extreme, so it’s easier if you just use Explorer. Create a new folder somewhere, fill it with whatever files you’d like to use in the slideshow, and rename them to ensure they’re in the right order (“1.This.jpg”, “2.That.jpg”).

Launch Alternate Pic View EXESlide, browse to your Slideshow folder and you’ll see your chosen photos in the image list. Drag and drop photos if you’d like to rearrange the order after all, or select an image and press Delete to remove it from the list.

While short on slideshow-building features, EXESlide can save your work in a host of formats and fie types

Various slideshow options are displayed at the bottom of the screen. You’re able to set the default time each photo will remain on the screen, as well as varying that for an individual image when appropriate. The slideshow can be given an MP3 or WAV soundtrack, and clicking View > Slideshow displays a preview of the results so far.

When you’re happy, just click File and choose one of the Create options to export your work. Create Executable File, for example, saves the slideshow as an EXE or SCR file. Launch this on any modern PC and its images should be displayed immediately.

Export your slideshow as a Flash applet and it should be visible from any browser (depending on your device, anyway). A sample HTML file is included for easier viewing.

There’s also the option to save the slideshow as an animated GIF. This limits you to a 256-colour palette, though, so while it can work for presentations, it’s fairly useless with photos.

In theory you can also export your photos as an AVI video. This didn’t work for us – we were left with a huge video file which displayed nothing at all – but you might be luckier.

And as a fun extra, you’re even able to export a single image in the form of a simple game. “Puzzle”, for example, converts your first image into a mosaic, rearranges the tiles, and leaves you with the task of putting them back in order.

Alternate Pic View EXESlide is horribly limited as a slideshow builder, then, with a poor interface which really needs replacing immediately. But it can string a few images together, with a soundtrack, and if you can use one or two of these export formats then the program could be worth a look.