I have a coworker who is retiring later this week (on Thursday). He’s been working here for 32 years.
I have been tasked with providing a slideshow. Over the past couple weeks I have gathered a couple hundred pictures and want to display them in a slideshow.
Can someone recommend some software to do this? It needs to run on Windows 7 and either be free or relatively cheap (less than $30CAN).
Minimum functionality:
loop through the pictures without manual intervention
have each picture display for “x” seconds then move to the next picture
simple to use. Ideally I’d love to point it to a folder and just throw the pictures into it. I don’t want to configure scripts, timelines, etc.
Bonus functionality:
ability to play music (not a huge deal if it can’t, I was just going to play a Spotify playlist in the background)
randomize the order of the pictures
snazzy picture transitions
Any real world recommendations would be muchly appreciated.
If not, I think Win7 still had Movie Maker native on it. Add the pictures, add transitions (or not), add music (or not) & save it as an mp4 (File --> Save movie --> {Resolution})or (File --> Publish movie {youtube, Fakebook, etc.}). This way you could build it at your desk but play it in the conf room. The default is 7 sec for a .jpg which I think is long; you can change that, either customizing per picture, or en masse. You can also add titles & captions as desired.
Your Windows 7 should have Windows Photo Viewer as the default program for looking at images (like .jpeg files). Press F11 or the bottom button to play a slide show of the images in that folder in full screen. It’s probably the easiest program to find and use. Double click on an image file and see what opens.
OpenOffice is free and pretty close to classic Microsoft Office in functionality. They have an application called Impress that should easily do what you want.
IrfanView is freeware for Windows and can most of that the OP asks (under File | Slideshow). There are options to scale the pictures to full screen while keeping aspect ratio, etc. I don’t think it does music or snazzy transitions, though.
You could also just load up the pictures on a USB key and plug that into a smart TV, if one is available.
Honestly, the OP has an embarrassment of riches at his disposal. There are plenty of programs which are either free or probably already on the computer which can do what he wants. In order to say what’s best, we’d need to know more parameters (like, say, what programs he’s already familiar with).