Lightroom, and the use of virtual copies for slideshow speaker’s notes
Someone asked an interesting question at Adobe's Lightroom forum - how can you make speaker's notes to accompany a slideshow? He wanted these notes to be hard copy printouts, with multiple images per page, and with notes beneath each picture. Having inflicted death by Powerpoint on many occasions, this is how I'd approach it in Lightroom.
Start in Library by putting the images for the slideshow into a new collection - this makes it easier to recall the set of pictures.
Then enter your speaker's notes in the Metadata panel. It may seem obvious to write the notes in the image's IPTC caption, but what if you don't want to overwrite any existing information in that field? You might use a more obscure field - the IPTC instructions for instance - but another idea is make virtual copies of each file and use these purely for the slideshow. This takes advantage of the virtual copy's ability to have completely different metadata from the master file, so now you can safely overwrite the caption field. Another benefit is that you may need to tweak your pictures' appearance to suit the projector or auditorium, and again virtual copies let you do so without affecting the masters.
Once you have entered your speaker's notes, then you need to print them in a way that helps you give the presentation. Go to Print and create a grid of images - start with a 2*1 grid. Eliminate as much unnecessary space as you can - margins, cell spacing etc - and then click the Add button in the left panel to save the print layout. Apart from anything else, this is simply a good habit.
To display your notes in this layout, go to Print's Overlays panel, tick Photo Info and choose Edit from the drop down menu. Add the caption or whatever other field you used, and update the Print template.
But if you want your presentation to be really slick, there's a little problem. While Lightroom now displays the caption below each slide, you can only set the maximum font size to 16. That's small, and no match for Powerpoint speaker's notes which are easy to read from a distance - without making it obvious to your audience.
Here's a handy trick to make the caption font more legible. Right click the template and choose Show in Explorer/Finder. Then edit the template file in Notepad/TextEdit and change the line “metadataFontSize = 16,” to “metadataFontSize = 32,” for example. Close and reopen Lightroom, and you have now forced Slideshow to use your choice of font size. You may not get the size right first time, and the larger the text the smaller the image, but these are speaker notes rather than handouts. Printed out, with the text nice and big, they're perfect for that quick glance during your show.
Here's my Slideshow speakers notes template.