Simple way of creating photo-slideshow-with-music

[dhicks]

Hello All,

 

What is the best way to go about showing (on a projected screen) a series of photos, in order, with a piece of music playing in the background? The timing of the photo slideshow needs to exaclty match the music, and the output needs to be as good quality as possible. Image Google photoshow screensaver but with background music. We could do with something embedable in PowerPoint as out teachers can use that (we can set up a slideshow for them, then all they have to do is press the right arrow key to advance through slides).

 

I've tried doing a slideshow with Windows Movie Maker, but you can't accuratly set the number of frames you want to show a picture for, you can only set whole seconds. Adobe Premier Pro almost works well, but for some reason only allows you to sort a set of images by modified date. PowerPoint, for some reason, when showing a movie produced by Premier Elements showed what seemed to be a low-res version of an image for a couple of seconds before eventually loading the high-res one, which seemed odd.

 

I guess what I actually want is a Flash object that I can give a list of images and an audio file and leave it to sort itself out. I don't seem to be able to modify the transparecy of a bitmap image with Flash MX 2004, so no nice cross-fade effect. Does Flash CS3 / Flex allow this? Is there a handy all-in-one application around someplace that does this for us?

 

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David Hicks

[Netman]

Have you looked at Photostory? Microsoft Photo Story 3 for Windows: make show-n-tell cool again

[rh91uk]

Thanks Netman - i've been looking for something to do this properly for ages!

[OutToLunch]

The alternative that I normally use is Irfanview - this can build a very nice simple standalone slideshow with background MP3/WAV and will accept part seconds for frame display if you're doing length of song in seconds divided by number of photos.

 

IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide

 

Been playing with Faststone Image Viewer lately which can also do this but with more flashy transitions - haven't done a proper one to show in an assembly/parents evening etc with it yet though.

[powdarrmonkey]

I'd second photostory. Even teachers can use it

[imiddleton25]

You will find it hard to beat photostory 3

[eddyc]

I too can also recommend photostory - every year i use it to string together the leavers photos with some music in the background for their last assembly....

[Cue]

You should be able to be a lot more accurate than 1 second on Movie Maker. Have you tried using the zoom tool to zoom in on the timeline? It lets you be more accurate with your changes, unless you're using the new Movie Maker Live which is more of a downgrade than an upgrade (Windows 7 is the only one you'll be forced to use this on...).

[dhicks]

Hmm. That's more than 3 votes for Photostory, guess I have to go get it now :-)

 

You should be able to be a lot more accurate than 1 second on Movie Maker.

 

Yes, but I don't want to mess around editing individual images, I just want to give the computer 30-odd images and a peice of music and have it spew out a nice ready-to-go slideshow for me. Actually, I don't want to do this at all, I want something simple enough for teachers to use.

 

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David Hicks

[rdk]

Why not just set timings in PowerPoint, then once its playing the slideshow plays through automatically with the slides changing when the time has been set. Teachers can rehearse and get everything exactly right. There's an option for having the music play through all slides, not just the first slide where you place the sound file.

[rh91uk]

It's just the convinience for dragging a whole load of Photo's into an application and adding the music - a minute work rather than 10 mins work in powerpoint.

[Soulfish]

animoto - the end of slideshows is one service that I've used. I know they have some options for free/low cost subscriptions for education

[EduTech]

Photostory FTW! i always use it and its great, like someone said above even staff can use it and it's hard to teach any staff here how to use software at the easiest of times.

 

have fun!

[mac_shinobi]

cant picassa do something similiar ?

[pod]

I am also a fan of Photostory 3 however as we have a locked down version of Windows Media Player it won't play movies made in Photostory 3 because of codec problems.

 

I installed vlc on the workstations using Photostory 3 to workaround the problem, it will play the movie (and just about everything else) fine.

[LukeC]

Photostory ftw. Allows you to edit pictures slightly time your music to the "story" crop your pictures and allows you to add effects and captions

[Mr.Ben]

As try Tweak PS in addition to photostory - You can edit all slides timings in one go rather than bothering to do each one individually within photostory.

 

Tweak PS - Photo Story Tweak Tool

[dhicks]

Why not just set timings in PowerPoint, then once its playing the slideshow plays through automatically with the slides changing when the time has been set. Teachers can rehearse and get everything exactly right. There's an option for having the music play through all slides, not just the first slide where you place the sound file.

 

Good idea, but our teachers don't have time to rehearse anything. They can understand pressing the "next" button to advance a PowerPoint slide, but that's about it. They tend to like, and understand, nice simple setups where going to a particular slide plays a photo show. This means we can do stuff for assemblies where they have a title screen, then another slide with a photoshow (or a video, whatever), then maybe a blank, black slide so they can blank the screen without having to turn the projector off. I can sympethise with them, too - speaking in front of 500 pupils at morning assembly takes enough thinking about without having to worry about which buttons to press to get the slideshow to do what you want.

 

Something I might give a try is embedding one PowerPoint show inside another, I have a feeling this might do what I want.

 

Photostory FTW!

 

Looks like a decent bit of software generally, but doesn't do the exact thing we want. We have a bit of music X seconds long, Y number of photos, we want each photo to be displayed for X/Y seconds as something that can be embedded in PowerPoint. Our staff don't have time to fiddle around with anything beyond click-and-drag operations.

 

cant picassa do something similiar ?

 

We need software that can produce something we can embed in a PowerPoint file. I've had a look at Picasa before, it stores image mdification data in a file in the same folder as the images it is looking at. This would cause problems on a network share, with different people trying to use the same file.

 

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

As try Tweak PS in addition to photostory

 

Good plan, but after editing Photostory reckoned the file was corrupted.

 

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David Hicks

[Netman]

Also, Sonic do a plug in for Photo Story 3 so you can burn the slideshows to DVD for $19.99 Home User > Products > Sonic DVD for Photo Story 3 Makes it even easier for teachers

[Singist]

Has anyone tried this?

 

Flash Slideshow Maker - Create animated photo slide shows , flash banner and image scroller for website, blog, MySpace

[dhicks]

Has anyone tried this?

 

Looking at the demo running on the front page, it seems that the application can't do a simple fade from one image to another. This is a limitation of Flash (Flash MX, anyway) not being able to apply transparency to a bitmap image. It might be possible to do bitmap fades with a newer version of Flash or Flex, but this application, nifty though it is, doesn't seem to be able to.

 

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David Hicks