Old Slide Projector

An old-school slide projector for your desktop — and for the big screen.

Relive the ritual of the analog carousel projector: dim the room, load a tray of photos and click through them one by one — complete with the mechanical clunk of the slide change and the warm hum of the cooling fan.

Works with every image format your Windows codecs can read — JPG and PNG out of the box, plus Canon / Nikon RAW (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG …) and more as soon as the matching WIC codec is installed. It also auto-rotates every shot from its EXIF orientation, so those sideways phone photos always show up straight, both in the thumbnails and on screen.

Old Slide Projector turns any Windows PC into a nostalgic slideshow machine. On the surface it is deliberately simple — a strip of thumbnails, a Prev and a Next button — but underneath it is built to stay smooth and responsive with photo libraries of many thousands of images, to drive a second display at full screen, and to get every picture's orientation and framing right without you having to think about it. It's easy to use, yet quietly more capable than it looks.

The projector is not confined to your desktop. Connect a second monitor, a TV, or an actual video projector to a spare video output of your PC, and Old Slide Projector will show your photos full screen on that additional device while you keep the controls on your main screen. Aim it at a projector in a darkened room and you get exactly the effect of the old mechanical carousel: pictures thrown large on the wall, one satisfying clunk at a time.

• On a display or projector, the aspect ratio is detected automatically from the selected output device — no setup, it simply fills that screen correctly.
• In windowed mode, where there is no output device to measure, you choose the aspect ratio yourself (4:3, 16:9 or 16:10) from the drop-down, so the projection "canvas" always matches the look you want.

• Full-screen projection on a second display — send the show to a monitor, TV or projector on another video output while the controls stay on your main screen.
• Automatic aspect ratio from the selected output device, or a ratio you pick yourself (4:3 / 16:9 / 16:10) when projecting to a window.
• Thumbnail strip with the current slide highlighted and kept centered, so you always see what came before and what comes next; click any thumbnail to jump straight to it.
• Authentic "old school" feel — the mechanical slide-change sound and the cooling-fan hum, with independent volume sliders and a sliding transition between slides.
• Any WIC-supported format, decoded through the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) for accurate color. JPG and PNG work out of the box; the list of accepted formats is read from the codecs installed on your PC, so adding a codec pack (for example the Canon / Nikon RAW camera codecs — CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG …) makes those files load too, automatically and with no update to the program.
• Automatic EXIF rotation — portraits are turned the right way up automatically, in the thumbnails and in the projection alike.
• "Contain" framing — every photo is shown in full (letterboxed) with no cropping.
• Built-in test pattern (monoscope) to line up and calibrate the target screen.
• Image controls — keep aspect ratio, clipping, scaling and a vintage vignette effect.
• Pictures from any folder, with optional recursive search through sub-folders.
• Works with presentation remotes — most USB / Bluetooth presenter clickers act as a plain keyboard, so their Next / Previous / Start / Stop / blank keys (and the usual synonyms) drive the show whether the control window or the full-screen projector has focus.
• Black-screen toggle — blank the projection to a full black screen and back with a switch or the remote's blank button, while the projector window stays focused.
• Keyboard friendly — Page Up / Page Down move between slides even when the projector window has focus and the main window is tucked away in the tray.
• Lives in the tray, with minimize-to-tray and optional auto-start.

• Set the Pictures path (type it or browse to it) and, if your photos are spread across sub-folders, enable Recursive pictures search.
• Choose the Display: a connected monitor / TV / projector (aspect ratio auto-detected), or a Window with a 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10 ratio of your choice.
• Press Start to open the projector and Stop to close it. Show / Hide toggles the projector window, Monoscope shows a calibration test card, and Autofit re-fits the canvas to the screen.
• Move between slides in whichever way suits you:
  • Page Up — previous slide
  • Page Down — next slide
  • Click a thumbnail — go to that photo (a neighboring one slides across by a single step, a distant one jumps straight there), with the mechanical sound and animation.
• Set the mood with the Vignetting switch, the Mechanism sound and Fan noise sliders, and the Keep aspect ratio / Clipping / Scaling controls. Flip the Black screen switch to blank the projection to black and back.

Old Slide Projector can tuck itself into the Windows notification area (system tray) and be run from there, so a show can sit ready without a window in the way:

• Minimize to tray — minimizing the control window sends it to a tray icon instead of leaving it on the taskbar.
• Double-click the tray icon to bring the control window back (also available as Open in the menu).
• Right-click the tray icon for a full context menu: Open the window, Start / Stop the show, Show / Hide the projector, Monoscope, Autofit, the Clipping / Scaling / Keep aspect ratio toggles, and Quit.
• Auto-start (in Config…) opens the projector on launch, and with auto-minimize to tray it drops straight to the tray afterwards — so the app can come up already projecting and be driven entirely from the tray menu or a presenter remote.

Most USB / Bluetooth presentation clickers simply act as a keyboard, so Old Slide Projector reacts to the keys they send — and to the common synonyms different models use — whether the control window or the full-screen projector has focus:

Because these follow the de-facto PowerPoint slide-show keys, it works out of the box with most popular remotes (Logitech, Kensington and the many generic clones). Typing into a text field is never intercepted, so the shortcuts stay out of your way.

Old Slide Projector is designed to stay responsive on folders holding thousands upon thousands of images. Thumbnails are produced on a background worker thread, so the interface never freezes while pictures decode. Loading is lazy: only the thumbnails around the visible part of the strip are generated (plus a small look-ahead margin for smooth scrolling), and every result is cached — so scrolling back is instant and the app never tries to chew through an entire huge folder at once. The full-resolution picture for the projection itself is always loaded on demand.

Old Slide Projector depends on Anafestica, a C++Builder support library that provides the form-persistence and configuration-registry framework the app is built on (its headers are included as anafestica/…). To build:

1. Clone Anafestica and make it available on the project's search path — the project looks for an Anafestica\anafestica folder, either alongside the project or in the shared Embarcadero $(BDSCOMMONDIR)\hpp library location.
2. Open OldSlideProjector.cbproj in Embarcadero C++Builder (FireMonkey / FMX) and build the Win64x (Win64 modern) target.

C++ · Embarcadero C++Builder (FireMonkey / FMX) · Anafestica · Windows · Windows Imaging Component (WIC)