5 Slick, Gorgeous, & Free Slideshow Widgets For Your Facebook Page Or Website [Weekly Facebook Tip]

Facebook page owners often find that Facebook severely limits their ability to be creative with their Facebook page. Without knowing the ins and outs of coding your own Facebook applications, sometimes it can seem impossible to get anything set up. But there’s hope for certain things, such as slideshows of photos.

Since Facebook doesn’t seem to want you to be able to host slideshows of photos you put on your Facebook page, we’ve uncovered a handful of other ways you can do it. These beautiful widgets can also be embedded on other websites you own, too. Get your best pictures ready from Flickr or Instagram and get started!

Get A HTML Tab For Your Facebook Page

To begin with, if you’re looking to embed your slideshow in a Facebook page, you’ll need to get an app that will allow you to add your own HTML markup. Static HTML is a good one to try. To add any of the following slideshow widgets, you’ll need to put the code into the Static HTML tab of your page. The Static HTML application limits you to 810×800 area before you will be forced to use scrollbars.

Note that if you add a slideshow to a tab, Facebook may disapprove as they have strict policies about auto-playing media, although they specifically mention video and audio media.

Flickr Slideshow

Flickr Slideshow is a simple way to create a slideshow out of your Flickr pictures. All you need is to decide whether you want to use all of your photos, or a set, or one of your group’s photos. Just plug in the URL and dimensions and it will generate a Flickr slideshow for you. This actually uses Flickr’s API and is therefore generated by Flickr itself, but it’s really straightforward to use.

Flickr Show

Flickr Show is a gorgeous Javascript slideshow creator for your Flickr photos. You can use a set, a user-curated gallery or a Flickr group of photos for your slideshow. All you need to know is the ID number of the photo collection you want to use, then pair it with the correct Javascript for the type.

For instance, there’s a specific piece of code for sets of photos and another for groups. Flickr Show also lets you set autoplay to off, which is great for Facebook compliance.

Note, to use this with the Static HTML tab you will need to add some height information to the DIV in the code, for instance style=”height:500px;” so that the first line reads:

SnapWidget

SnapWidget is a neat way to create a widget for Instagram photos. It doesn’t require any login at all – all you do is enter in your username and any hashtags you want to feature. You can choose whether to have it run as a slideshow or not, to have hover effects over photos, size, background colours and padding. Preview the result and you’re ready to cut-and-paste the code for your widget.

Flickr

Some people don’t realise that you can create a slideshow widget using Flickr itself. Head to any set of photos and you’ll see the slideshow option in the top-right corner. When your slideshow is running, click on “Share” and you’ll see automatically generated code for a slideshow widget. If you want to adjust the size of the widget you can do so by clicking “Customize this HTML“.

SlideShare

If you’ve been building a collection of presentations on SlideShare, you can build a slideshow widget of your uploaded presentations. This would be a great slideshow to feature on a more business-oriented Facebook Page.

More Reading

If you love tools for photos and Facebook tips, check out these articles:

• 3 Things You Need To Know About Photo Tagging In Facebook
• How To Hide What You Read Outside Of Facebook [Facebook Tip/Hack Of The Week]
• Using IFTTT To Automate All Your Facebook Photos & Video [Facebook Tip Or Hack Of The Week]
• Three Great Facebook Photo Tips [Facebook Hack Or Tip Of The Week]

What are some of your favourite slideshow widgets you think people might like to embed in a Facebook Page?

Originally published on MakeUseOf.com. Great site, check it out.