How to merge albums from different projects into one slideshow

You have created two slideshows in two different projects, Slideshow 01.pdm and Slideshow 02, respectively. Each of the slideshow contains multiple albums.

One day you come out with the idea of merging the two slideshows together into a single one. You think that’s great. But, how to do that?

There is no intuitive way to achieve this at present. You may need to manually edit the .pdm files to merge slideshows.

The .pdm file keeps a record of all the information of the photo slideshow you create and modify, such as project name, album names, names and locations of source images, effects used, theme chosen, etc. All settings are written in the .pdm file in XML document.

1. Knowing the slideshow project file

The information of a single album is written between the <Album_Data> tags. Simplified examples are as follows:

2. Draft out a merging plan

Before taking action to edit the project files to merge slideshows, you should have a clear plan. Which albums are to be merged into which slideshow project, and how should the order be arranged?

In this tutorial example, we want to merge the first album (with id=“0”) of the Slideshow 01.pdm into Slideshow 02.pdm, as the last album.

3. Open project file in XML editor

You may need XML editor (Notepad is recommended) to edit the .pdm file. And please DO set the encoding mode to UTF-8.

4. Copy selected album data

There are numerous lines of code in the .pdm file, truly. Never mind. You can identify what you need by searching for the Album_Data id="0" (replace the ID number if you want other ones).

After locating the opening tag of an album data, scroll down to find the ending tag (</Album_Data>) as well. And then copy the code between the tags (including the opening and closing tags).

Following is an example of the complete code of a single album. Click to expand the code in full details. Click again to collapse it.

<Album_Data id="0">…………</Album_Data>

5. Paste album data to target place

Now let’s open Slideshow 02.pdm. For example, there 3 albums in Slideshow 02.pdm and you want to add the album just after the second one (with Album_Data id="1").

You should identify the closing tag of the album data of the second album (or the opening tag of the third one, you got the same place). And then paste the code after the closing tag of the second album (or before the opening tag of the third one).

6. Modify album ID

Now the album from Slideshow 01.pdm has been added to the Slideshow 02.pdm, but you get two albums with the same ID: Album_Data id="0"

Because album ID of each single slideshow project starts with 0 (zero), so most of the time there will be overlap ID in merged project. You need to renumber the album ID as folllows:

7. Update the number of albums

The last step is updating the number of albums in the newly merged slideshow project.

In the second line the .pdm file, you will see code like this

Change the value of album_count to the number of albums currently contained in the slideshow project.

In our example, there are 4 albums in Slideshow 02. pdm after merge. So we change the attribute to: album_count="4"

So far, all things have been done. Save the changes and open Slideshow 02.pdm, you will see the slideshow has 4 albums, with the one added from Slideshow 01.pdm.

Still can’t figure out how to do it? Let’s do it for you!

If you find this method is too complicated for you to understand and follow, let us do the work for you.

You just need to send the project files you have created, and tell us how you would like the slideshows to be merged, as detailed as possible.

Please contact us if you need help on merging slideshows.