After I found out that Blender has a dedicated video sequence editor, I thought it is worth the effort to try making animatesd slide shows with it.
The good news: it works, sort of, the GUI is not that bad. It is possible to load pictures, stretch them to the desired sequence length, insert per-picture and picture-to-picture transition effects, including the one that is known elswhere as "Ken Burns", i.e. zooming and panning in the picture... The bad news: Blender downsamples every imported image to the selected video resolution. When I zoom into an image using the transform effect, Blender does NOT used the original image quality but just inflates the pixels of the previously downsampled image!!! This ruins the whole function and makes it practically useless. My big multi-megapixel-images just get squeezed to nothing and then inflated into an ugly pixelated mess. How sad, 10 hours of work wasted just because someone who coded this function didn't understand the basic mathematics of scaling, viewports and linear transformations... So I ended up discarding yet another tool that looked nice at first but failed due to some very simple things not correctly implemented. On the list of failures are also: - Jahshaka (spent several days to get it working, no hope) - Cinelerra: Editing simply doesn't work, crashes and hangs frequently, looks abandoned. - Kino: solution looking for a problem - Slcreator: nice idea to provide GUI frontend to DVD-Slideshow, but loves crashing and wasting memory and is written in some Visual Basic derivative that no one else wants to develop with... why didn't that guy use python, perl or TCL? Again, the mathematics and code are simple and Kdenlive looks like the right place where to put it but is anyone still working on it or has it been abandoned? As long as the programming interface for filters in Kdenlive permitted working on the full-res image and not the downsampled stuff, it would be easy to avoid the above-mentioned problem.
