Easy Slideshow Creation with Photo Story 3

Photo Story 3 is a great piece of software (albeit from Microsoft). But, somewhat shockingly, it’s free. Download it here. Why should you?

Because you want to string together a lot of pictures with cool transistions in a minimum amount of time that will work as song backgrounds during worship.

Because your kid’s church needs a quick slideshow with pictures taken just an hour before.

Because you have a lot of embarassing pictures of your friends that you’d like to comment upon and put up on YouTube, Google Video, or Myspace.

Because it’s fun.

Although I’m certain Microsoft didn’t have the church worship market in mind when they made Photo Story, it makes customized, moving backgrounds a breeze. Imagine using your congregation’s own pictures beneath a song.

Photo Story allows you to

drop numerous images into a timeline

perform minor editing on the pictures (crop, red eye removal, and a few arty effects)

rearrange the pictures on the timeline

add title screens or captions

add narration for each picture

add background music (and yes, mp3s will work)

and export it to a number of web friendly sizes

There are two major drawbacks, though both can be overcome.

1. The length of each picture is set at a default of 5 seconds. There is no way to change this, unless you download and run this third-party extension. Also, you cannot change the transition effects (say you wanted a pan from left to right instead of right to left). The extension listed above only helps that by giving you the option to completely disable the panning.

2. No native export to DVD ability. There’s a $20 plugin available from Sonic that will let you save to a DVD directly from Photo Story, but I may have found a workaround. After saving my photostory at a level suitable for playback on my computer, I opened Windows Movie Maker, imported my photostory, and then saved the movie to a DVD from there. I have a few different codecs on my computer, so I’m not sure if this works natively from Movie Maker, but it’s worth a shot before dropping $20 on the plugin, which, by the way, only allows you to burn one photostory to a dvd and does not allow you to edit, in any way, the title screen.

I recently made a photostory of 235 pictures for a wedding, and it has been well received, although exporting it to a DVD would have been better, as trying to find a computer at the church to play the resultant WMV file proved harder than expected.

This is a highly recommened product because it’s free, it’s easy, and it’s fun. So go play…