Once again I have put in charge of a project I know nothing about.
My new task: Put together a slide show of company digital photos and burn that slide show onto a CD to be shown at a meeting later on. Preferably self looping.
Any help with online tools (if needed) appreciated.
Budget: Free.
Thanks, Steven
Use the Simple Movie-making Program–Windows Movie maker, iDVD, etc–that probably came with your computer to make a silde-show DVD. That way you can play it back on a bog-standard DVD player. 
What kind of computer do you have? Does it have a DVD burner? Do you have access to a DVD player and a projector?
The alternative is a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation.
If you have Windows XP (or probably Vista, too), you can just burn all of your images on to a CD and put the CD into a computer with XP (or Vista, too), then go to “My Computer”, double click the CD to open it in Explorer (not Internet Explorer, just Windows Explorer) and then choose “View as a slideshow” in the left-hand menu or double-click on the first picture to open it in Windows Picture And Fax Viewer then click the “Start Slideshow” button.
Try it out on your My Documents folder, or the folder where all the images currently reside. The only thing you’ll want to do before burning is rename the images in alphabetical/numerical order, however you want them shown.
If he has to show it at a meeting, they’re probably not going to cluster around a single monitor and watch a slideshow; he probably has to be able to pop it into a DVD player, which will then show it on a big TV set. (This is popular at funerals, too, in my experience. 
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Windows Moviemaker is an adequate slideshow maker. Dunno if you can loop it, but I’d be surprised if you couldn’t. If you’ve got XP or Vista, it’s already on your computer.
If you use the PowerPoint option, saving as a .pps file (instead of .ppt) make it automatically open as a slide show. Even just renaming works, at least for XP systems and PPT 2003. We do this for conferences, since opening as a slideshow avoids fumbling around with the mouse.
As Duck Duck Goose pointed out it, this will be shown on a TV through a DVD player.
I’m working on a Dell XP. I haven’t found the Windows Moviemaker program yet (didn’t turn up on Search). It does have a burner, I’m using RecordNow!
WMM is installed only through Windows Updates, for some reason, so you’d have to turn on automatic updates for it to work. You can also download it from Microsoft Update.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx
I too have a Dell XP, and I have Updates turned on, and Moviemaker is not under Accessories where Microsoft sez it’s supposed to be.
I finally found it under Explore, Program Files – Movie Maker (it’s not in the Start menu), and you’ll have to go in and find the .exe file and run it.