Believe it or not there was a time when setting up a slideshow of your Christmas party photos, holiday snaps or baby pictures involved rigging up a projector screen, then meticulously feeding a series of tiny slides into a machine. More often than not, by the time the thing was ready to go, your audience was already bored witless and would smile and coo politely as their eyes glazed over at the sight of the giant, unclear images on the screen.

Thankfully, these 'shows' have now been largely relegated to the annals of history thanks to the advent of digital technology. There are now hundreds of different ways you can parade your photos to your friends and family via email, the web or locally on your PC. Flash has proved a robust tool for delivering engrossing slideshows online and is capable of a range of cool effects. However, most people find the Macromedia authoring tool either too complex or too expensive to bother with. Amara sets out to provide the functionality of Flash without the hassle of negotiating the timeline or fiddling around with ActionScript.

The program certainly allows you to pull off some clever slideshow trickery, through the use of key points to deliver animation, the addition of audio tracks, or by adding text and hyperlinks to the photos in your presentation. Once you've got to grips with the application's fiddly interface, you're able to immerse yourself in a multitude of options for displaying images in an imaginative way, with almost the same power as Flash itself. Once the movie is finished it can be compressed without any significant reduction in quality, and quickly exported for the web.

Although it includes lots of these powerful tools, the program fails somewhat in its mission to provide a more simple way to author Flash slideshows than the authoring tool itself. This is because the interface is pretty complicated and some of the tools take a while to get.accustomed to. Annoyingly, the trial version of the program doesn't allow you to preview the results in a browser, and you can't appreciate the full picture using the small preview pane in the app. Nevertheless, it's probably worth forking out the cash for the full version upgrade if you want to create stunning presentations without suffering the intimidating, bloated nature of Flash.