My wife came home from Paris with only about 350 photos on her digital camera. What she wants to do is to burn these to a CD so she can give/mail them out, but she’d prefer not to have each person have to open each photo individually by going to the CD and double-clicking. Something more like an autorunning slideshow.
Is there any program out there (or freeware) that can do something like this?
Worse comes to worse I suppose I could write some kind of simple javascript HTML page with a forward button, but that would require me to rename all the photos, plus I’d have to bone up on javascript.
I did this one time while using my digital camera to make bad stop motion animation:
I took each photo and loaded into Windows Movie Maker. I set the “length” of each photo as if it were a scene in a movie. It came out quite well. Of course the user would have to have Windows Media Player and would not have a lot of control over the speed of the photos, but it would work.
Windows XP has a screensaver that runs a slideshow of pictures from any folder you set it to. There are also a lot of similar screensaver/slideshow programs that you can download either for free or for a small fee. I think a lot of photo editing software comes with a slideshow program, possibly one you could burn to disc in a “pack-and-go” fashion. I’ve used powerpoint for slideshows with just a few pictures, but AFAIK you have to insert each picture individually. Doing 350 pictures that way would take a LOT of time.
Irfanview is a nice free image viewer/convertor that includes a slideshow feature. You can make an exe file or a screensaver, and burn it directly to CD. (I haven’t tried the CD part - no burner here.)
What about making a Kodak Picture CD or something similar? Most DVD players can play them and I believe Roxio can make them, although I’m not sure exactly what making one entails. I know my dad’s successfully made a few discs and he’s not the smartest cookie when it comes to this newfangled GUI stuff, so it can’t be overly difficult.
Windows XP has a power toy which can do slideshows. I would imagine that there are many freeware programs that could do something similar. Check download.com
I’ve create an html page with some javascript to switch the photos every few minutes or when you click next. The upshot of using html is anyone can read it Mac, PC, whatever.
Another vote for Irfanview. It is free and a great viewer but it requires installation on your computer (as probably all other programs do). I would just burn the JPGs in a folder and include the Irfanview installation file in another.
Just drag the photos you want to the data window, set the delay to 5 sec (they set it to infinity so you push a button to see the next one), & write them to a cd or dvd, the whole process takes just a few minutes. I think you can have about 9,000 photos on a cd but I forgot exactly how many but who wants to watch that many in one sitting?
Oh and dont forget to add a music track, gives the slideshow a bit more taste, that you can have running all the time as a screen saver type application
Try slideshowfull it sounds like just what you are looking for. Nothing to install just unzip it and put your pictures and any mp3 files in the same folder and your ready to go. Best part is it free and can fit on a floppy. You can download it at http://hjem.get2net.dk/lpj/Download.htm
I use PGG for that kind of thing - but then I’m kind of a minimalist.
To use PGG, you just organize your pictures in to directories by subject or theme or whatever so need to arrange by, and PGG runs through and generates html pages with previews of the photos in each directory and organizes them so that you can navigate up and down the directory structure.
Once you’ve done the first run, you can go back and edit some plain text files (that PGG generates) to add descriptions to the photos and directories. Then you do a second run through and PGG makes the finalized html pages with the descriptions included.
Finally, you can have PGG generate a clean directory that you can burn on to a CD.
Any computer that can handle a CD and the internet can then show you the photos.
The only real drawback is that it is a unix shell script. It runs just fine on Linux, and you could use it under Windows if you’ve got the Cygwin system installed.
The code isn’t very elegant - I just hacked it in about five minutes because I wanted to show some pictures to someone. It might be a pain to put 350 pictures in it. Also, the way I built it requires a thumbnail of each picture, although it would be simple enough to modify it to just use the same picture and shrink it down - something you don’t want to do on the web for performance reasons, but if you’re just reading from a CD it should be okay.
If you want to use it and can’t figure out how it works, I can explain it. I might even refactor it to let it easy handle hundreds of photos if you want. You also have to strip out the sitemeter code.
The nice thing about the HTML method is that all you have to do is throw the HTML page on the CD, and you’re done. Everyone has a browser. So they don’t have to install any applications, and it’s guaranteed to work on any computer as long as you follow basic conventions.
Years ago, I watched a fantastic 30 minute short film in the cinema - back in the days when you still used to get short features as part of your admission price.
It was a 30 minute short film about a motorbike rally somewhere in England in the early 1980’s - and it featured about 8 songs by the Police - not their hits, but rather their album tracks which were also really strong songs.
The film had no commentary - only the music - and the only stuff you saw were sets of 3 or 4 “motordrive” photgraphs montaged one after the other over the top of each other in sequence of fades. Each photo lasted for about 8 seconds I’d say and then the next motordrive photo would fade over the top of that. The nature of the music, and the quality of the photographs was such that you got this really cool sense of narrative but you also could really sink your teeth into the imagery as well.
I’d love to know how I could do that on my PC these days.
I recently bought a NIKON CoolPix 5700 and it’s a great bit of gear - with motordrive functions built into it. I’d love to make my own DVD’s featuring my fave music and and well, it’s a real cheap form of movie making actually.
Dvd writers usually come with software to do that BBF. Like mine came with SonicMydvd, which can even make motion menus on vcds or dvds & has a create slideshow option with effects.
