3D-Wall

Shanghai Polar Vision's 3D-Wall creates an attractive wall-style photo display. The program doesn't offer much in the way of features, so it's not for users who want to make customized slideshows. But for a simple, sleek and free photo display, 3D-Wall fits the bill.

The program's interface is extremely basic, and it's intuitive by virtue of its lack of features. You can select either individual photos or folders of photos to include in your presentation. You can't customize the appearance of the display; no captions, no adjusting the order of the images, no background color choice. You select your photos, click the Preview button, and there's your display. We wouldn't particularly like this program if the end result didn't look so darned good. Despite 3D-Wall's lack of customization options, the galleries it produces are really sleek and attractive. It arranges your images in a grid on a black background; clicking on a particular image increases its size and smoothly slides it to the foreground. Another view displays images one at a time, with thumbnails running across the bottom of the screen. Presentations can be exported as EXE files that can run on computers that don't have 3D-Wall. We do wish that the program had a Help file--there's a button for one, but it doesn't seem to do anything--but, overall, we liked 3D-Wall quite a bit.

As noted, 3D-Wall is free. It installs desktop icons without asking but uninstalls cleanly. We recommend this program to all users.