I had to add an image slideshow just at the beginning of an article in Joomla CMS. I searched for such extension and found few good ones.
1) Simple Picture Slideshow | Demo
This is a simple extension with only one transition effect ‘fade out’. Slideshow can be started manually or automatically on pageload. Button controls (previous, next, start, stop) can be displayed in the slideshow.
The following code should be added in the article to display the slideshow. You have to specify the folder name where your slideshow images reside:
{besps}folder/subfolder{/besps}
Showplus is built with Mootools Javascript Framework that ships with Joomla itself. There is no jQuery import. Hence, no possibility of script conflicts.
The slideshow looks promising with six customizable transition types: fade, zoom, pan, Ken Burns effect, push, wipe. You can also display horizontal or vertical navigation bar with small thumbnail images that allow for fast navigation.
3) ARI Image Slider | Demo
This image slideshow extension is based on the popular Nivo Slider jQuery plugin. It has 16 transition effects like slide, fade, box, slice, etc. It is responsive. It can generate thumbnail previews. This extension can also be integrated with other ARI’s extensions like ARI Lightbox, ARI Fancybox, ARI Colorbox and ARI Pretty Photo.
Based on my project requirements, I chose to use ARI Image Slider extension. However, the other two are also very effective. These three are just a few of the many other such extensions present in Joomla’s Extension directory.
Note that: Simple Picture Slideshow has a code to put in individual article. You can specify the folder name in that piece of code. However, Showplus and ARI Image Slider don’t have such code. For these two modules, you can create multiple modules of those modules type and then use another extension like Modules Anywhere to load the module in any of your article.