If you’re a photography enthusiast who is looking for a new way to spice up your digital photo albums, NetGUI has a new product that you need to check out. The CaptiVision software allows you to create online presentations and movies out of images, using Flash. You can add audio tracks, backgrounds, voice narration and a series of special effects. Click here to see some samples.

These enhanced photo albums and presentations are designed to automatically play in your Email application or as a movie in your browser. You can choose from dozens of album themes or you can create a style of your own. Working through the application, As you work through the application, you are guided through a process of organizing your image files, creating album pages and choosing from a wide variety of effects, including, rotate, sweep, dissolve, enlarge, etc.

To learn more about the functionality of CaptiVision, I spoke with Michael Brough, of Media Relations. In a former position, he was involved with a company that would send out video Emails. One concern when sending out these email files was the threat of a virus. As Michael pointed out: “Most corporations will say that if Emails come in with a paper clip attached and you don’t recognize the sender, you should delete it.”

“Another issue is that they tend to clog the Email distribution systems. It also makes it more difficult to keep track of them all. As an example, if people have different JPEG photos sitting in their Inbox, where did they save them to? If they received them in AOL, attachments are going into an AOL directory. If they received them in Internet Explorer, the attachments are probably going into a download directory instead of into My Pictures unless they know what they’re doing. Our process places the files in one place so they are easy to find.”

“We embed the Flash into an Email and if the user can view HTML in their Inbox, we’ve put a little HTML around it as well, so as they’re waiting for it to load, they’ve got something else to look at. Originally, we had audio in the file, but now we strip that out, with the intention of keeping the file size down to 10-15K, if possible.”