I belong to a photo club which meets monthly at our senior center. The host/president shows our images on a video screen from a new MacBook, which she’s not used to. Since a few of our members join remotely she uses Zoom to share the images, but she has not mastered Zoom very well. She can’t figure out how to show the in-person audience the images without various menus and the windows of the remote members also being displayed.
I’m no Zoom expert myself, but believe this should be possible. If anyone would be willing to work with me on this, I’d like to send you a couple of photos I took at the last meeting to show what I’m talking about. You can reach me directly at paulbrians@gmail.com.
Zoom has an extensive Help section for running meetings here:
The featured topics (use the on-screen arrows to scroll through them) and the AI-powered chat agent are a quick way to answer many basic questions and get step-by-step guidance.
When you click on the Share icon at the bottom of the Zoom window, you’re presented with a dialog asking what to share. It sounds like the person you’re describing is clicking on the thumbnail underneath “Entire screen”. Most likely she wants to just share one of the items in the Application Windows section. If she does that, then only the chosen window will appear to the meeting participants.
Of course, this depends a little bit on where her images are located, and how she normally browses them. If they are, for instance, in Photos, then what I suggested above should work perfectly.
I think she has a folder on her desktop, but I’m not sure. I’d like to show you what her screen looks like so you could see what’s going on. Can I send you a couple of photos? Yes, she wants to show only one photo at time. She could use Keynote except that she wants to share with the remote members who also speak sometimes.
I’ve found in the last couple of years that Zoom has become much difficult to use. When I first encountered it at the start of the Pandemic, it was very easy to use and operation was largely intuitive. That simplicity made it the video conference tool of choice compared to Microsoft Teams, which I initially found unusable. The Zoom Workspace is a pain because its calendar gets in the way of your personal calendar, and each new version of Zoom seems to change more things marking it hard to get up and running.
I agree that the UIs of these video-conferencing apps have become too messy. I much preferred the discontinued iChat and Skype (iChat was developed for the capabilities of Macs but was replaced by the less-functional Facetime - developed for the iPhone).
One of my gripes is that conference participants often don’t know how to mute their microphone or turn off their camera and this disrupts the experience for everyone. Another is the difficulty that presenters have, as described by the OP.
Some people don’t sit close or far enough to their mikes, too, and I often notice quite a difference in volume in a Zoom group. Does Zoom make any effort to adjust volume to something desirable?
Paul, feel free to send me a private message with the photos.
Based on what you said I suspect, though, that she may be doing things in a way that won’t work optimally with screen sharing of just one window. If it’s a folder on her desktop, then she can share that window once it is open. If all she does is show the participants the window when it’s organized as a Gallery, then you all should be able to see that. But if she wants to be able to use the space bar to open Quick Look to make a single image full size, participants won’t see that because it’s a separate, transient window that isn’t shared.
The better idea might be for her to bring the images into Photos and share that window. When you open an individual image in Photos it stays within the window, so that would get displayed to everyone.
Keynote (the “free” version) is pretty good for presenting photos and is reasonably intuitive to use. When I used to give presentations at conferences I would try to use my Mac instead of the venue equipment (inevitably Windows/Powerpoint users found that their carefully created videos failed to display during their presentation, despite working in the green room).
Importantly it should be easy to share the Keynote window/screen via Zoom and have complete control over the presentation.
One of my gripes is that conference participants often don’t know how to mute their microphone or turn off their camera and this disrupts the experience for everyone.
Zoom allows a host or co-host to mute everyone with one button in the Participants window/pane, and they can also turn off cameras for other participants. There is also a button to pause all participant activity in the case of a zoom bombing or other serious problem.
I have the reverse problem. I run Finger Lakes Runners Club board meetings, and I would prefer that everyone kept their mics on the entire time so I don’t have to keep reminding them to turn the mic on after they’ve started talking.
Yes - I have used the host’s powers to “control” meetings. I suppose my point is that Zoom/Teams/GoogleMeet/Facetime all have different UIs for the participants to turn mics and cameras off/on and none of them seem to be intuitive or self-evident.
