Why is it so hard to create a professional looking slide show of digital images on a web site? 

Infrastructure, Tools, and systems are critical for professionals and hobbyists.  If a tool saves time compared to the money it costs, it's worth it.  If it's free, that's even better.

It seems like putting photos on a web site and creating a slide show should be simple. Take some pictures, download photos off the camera, sort through them, pick a few good ones, do some minor editing and cropping, and upload them to a web site or gallery, update a few descriptions or notes and be done.  After that, post the image (or slide show) on a few other sites.  All of that should take about 15 minutes of work and using one tool that doesn't cost a fortune on both an Apple or Microsoft platform for any host provider. Sadly, in 2008 this can't be done on a Microsoft platform and can only be done by one host (.Mac) on an Apple platform.

The Apple platform with the .Mac hosting is the only thing that comes close. For everything else, it can take hours to create a photo gallery slide show. I can't find something simple to make this easier.

This is the list of 12 tools (okay it's a list of 14) with a few tools which are compelling. More...