Creating PowerPoint presentations is so 2003, gone are the days when you would pop up Microsoft office on your Windows computer, pull down a whole bunch of photos and create a photo presentation – just to share it with friends, family members or colleagues. Your photos are stored in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and you want a simple way to create a PowerPoint presentation or a photo slideshow with online and offline pictures.

Slideshare and Scribd are two popular websites which allows you to host your PowerPoint presentations online but you can’t use any of these sites to create a photo slideshow from scratch. Google Docs, Microsoft office web apps, Zoho and Prezi are some advanced  resources to create presentations online but none of them lets you create simple photo slideshows as fast and as easily as Slide.ly does.

Slide.ly  lets you create photo slide shows from Facebook albums, Flickr photos, Google Images, Instagram photos, Picasa web albums and also allows you to upload photos from your computer and stitch them together into a musical slideshow. The service allows you to pull images and photos you have shared across multiple social sites and handpick specific photos to create a unique photo slideshow or photo album.

Here is how the interface of Slide.ly looks like:

In the above example,  all of my Facebook albums are listed one after another. To add photos to my presentation, all I have to do is navigate to my Facebook album and select the photos I want to add to the slideshow. What’s unique about Slide.ly is that you can even add photos from your friend’s Facebook album, if the privacy settings of the photo in question is set to public or your friend has shared the photo with you.

Following is an example case where I have added a photo from one of my friend’s photo album:

Similarly, you can search for a specific Flickr user or tag, select photos from a photo-stream and add them to your photo slideshow. The biggest pitch of Slide.ly is how it allows users to create photo slide-shows from Facebook albums, it feels great to create a memorable online collection of photos by navigating through your own albums and the albums of your very close friends.

When you are done selecting all the photos, you will be asked to select a background music for the slideshow. There are hundreds of thousands of free tracks available in the Slide.ly gallery, pick the one which best fits the theme of your slideshow and merge it as the background audio of your presentation. Slide.ly also allows you to pull music from YouTube and Soundcloud, so finding the best audio file for background music won’t be too much of a problem.

I really like the way Slide.ly allows users to organize and pull photos from everywhere. I would love to see the service grow and add support for online cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Windows Live SkyDrive, Box.net and so on.

Given below is a photo album I found from the Slide.ly gallery