showplus 
showplus is powered by a slideshow script built entirely with the MooTools JavaScript framework that ships with Joomla, and uses no Flash technology. Having a showplus slideshow on a page incurs a footprint of about 30 Kb with only a single CSS file and a JavaScript file included in the page header. No jQuery or other libraries are imported, possibly leading to script conflicts.
Features:
* choose from six customizable transition types: fade, zoom, pan, Ken Burns effect, push, wipe
* attach captions to images with multilingual support using a labels file with fall-back to a default caption
* link each image to an arbitrary location
* order images according to filename or last modified time, shuffle images each time the page is shown, or specify custom order
* display horizontal or vertical navigation bar with small thumbnail images that allow for fast navigation
* set most important styles in the administration back-end
Required:
* Joomla 1.6 or later
--OR--
* Joomla 1.5.19 or later with MooTools Upgrade system plug-in enabled and PHP 5.2 or later
No use of Flash
Ready files from a folder
Needed to be best at fading effects without looking glitchie
Had a preference for Mooltools (which this uses), but jQuery would have been ok
I really appreciate that this one is non-commercial, not just for the cost, but the commercial ones tend to be overkill on features and complexity. This one is "just right"
Developers: Thank you! You are appreciated.
i chose this extension because it's the only one i found to use kenburns without flash.
Sadly, like i noticed nearly a month ago already, the kenburns is almost impossible to use as it is so much ressource hungry.
may it be on firefox or chrome, on a brand new site, so not bloated, it uses between 30 and 50% of my cpu on a clean, new computer. (dual core 8 gig ram)
and on older computers, it uses almost 100% of cpu.
so for kenburns effects, there's no way to use it at all (i found none actually)
As explained in reply to a similar comment below, most dynamic features including the Ken Burns effect are part of third-party code built into showplus and not showplus itself. Even while the developer has already gone a long way in improving the third-party code, the best solution would be to replace it entirely. My opinion, even if biased, is that showplus is a great Joomla extension despite a few limitations, especially in the light that it is completely free. "Below average" ratings are certainly not sending a positive message to the developer to spend time and effort on improving the software; on the contrary, they cast a shadow on 95% of the other features that work as intended with absolutely normal resource consumption. Also, do not forget that dynamically rescaling an image (e.g. as part of the Ken Burns effect) is an expensive operation and will likely never fall into the same category as a simple fade or cut effect.
One thing for improvement: some nicer navigation on the side of the slides would be better than in the middle of the pic.
As the showplus documentation points out, "the majority of client-side browser code has been taken from the project Slideshow2", which is third-party code. Even while the developer of showplus has no influence over the course Slideshow2 takes, he has already contributed several patches and improvements to Slideshow2 in showplus. The long-term plans are to replace Slideshow2 with a much more robust and flexible slideshow implementation. Unfortunately, negative reviews are no big encouragement to the developer to spend time and effort on future improvements.
One problem in reload page it brings the same one picture and this picture fades in another, it is always do the same in reloading page.
It has a small footprint and because it uses MooTools, there's less chance of conflicts with other extensions.
I have installed it on a few websites now including some customisation on one website and the available documentation was clear enough for me to do this without help from the developer. Thank-you!
Keep Up The Good Work!
Unfortunately, this is not factually correct. There are several sort criteria in showplus, and random is indeed one of them. Please check out back-end configuration settings "Default sort criterion" and "Default sort order".
I'm new to website development and Joomla, therefore, I always look for the simple and easy until I can get up to speed.
I tried a couple of other image sliders without much luck, I was most likely the problem and then I tried ShowPlus.
It work well right out the box (I guess that's a good way of saying it). No problems with the install, the set-up, or the performance.
I upgraded to J1.7 and a problem getting it to work (I did say I'm new at this).
When I say it as a J2.5 version, I decided to give it a try again. I couldn't get the tgz file to install, so I sent an email to the developer and requested a zip file. Guess what, you are right he sent it, now get this, within an hour.
GREAT EXTENSION, GREAT SUPPORT. THANKS
Many thanks and all the best for 2012!
His support is good enough so I sent him a donation.
Also the settings are easy to make. Works fine with browsers IE7 +, Safari, FF3.6 +, Chrome and Opera.
Unlike other funky slideshow stuff with lots of effects, Showplus captivates slideeffects with some simple but very nice slide effects that are completely sufficient.
Very nice and fast contact with a problem that I had with a solution within a day.