Promising more effects, more templates and more possibilities, the eighth version of Magix’s slideshow-creating software, Photostory, welcomes a YouTube direct upload feature and a raft of new text animations.

It also promises support for netbooks with a resolution of 1024 x 600, while a new slideshow wizard is on hand to guide first-timers. From the interface it’s easy to work out what’s meant to go where, with images dragged into the slideshow window and tweaked once they’re in place.

An awful lot is possible, from simple brightness and contrast adjustments, to stretching your images into a variety of shapes and sizes. You can even choose to have titles and captions bouncing up and down the screen like a ball, or have your images zoom in or out.

The YouTube feature is as simple as needs be, giving you the options of labelling and setting privacy features via the software itself. In fact, it’s hard to find much to fault, aside from the grey and orange interface which looks a little dated.