Slide Show Software

I have had a number of instances where I wanted to take a set of pictures and turn them into a slide show to share with a group of friends. In the Windows world, there is a useful piece of software for this, called Microsoft Photo Story 3. I have worked with Photo Story a number of times, and have learned a number of tricks for getting the software to do what I want it to. So here are my Photo Story Tips.

Photo Story 3 Slide Show Tips

Microsoft Photo Story 3 is a good tool for putting together a slide show from pictures. Some of the features which make it useful are:

- Photos can be arranged and rearranged on a storyboard
- Text captions for photos
- Adjustable duration of each photo
- Transitions between photos
- Panning across photos (the "Ken Burns effect")
- Narration and music
- Slide show output is a WMV file, so it can be viewed on most media players
- It's available for free from Microsoft


However, Photo Story 3 has some limitations which can be quite annoying:

- Limit of 300 photos per story*
- Does not handle video*
- There is no way to select multiple photos for batch operations (e.g. moving a group of pictures or setting the duration of a group of pictures)
- Music and narration are tied to a particular photo, making them difficult to manipulate
- Runs only on Microsoft Windows (sorry Mac & Linux users)
- No support for widescreen formats
- Microsoft is no longer supporting Photo Story, so none of these will be fixed by Microsoft


The asterisks above indicate that there are workarounds (below) for these issues. Here are some tips to make building a large slide show with Photo Story 3 easier:

1. Use Windows Movie Maker to assemble the slide show from parts generated by Photo Story. This is a workaround for the 300 photo limit and the lack of video support in Photo Story.
2. Plan ahead! Know where you want various photos in the show and arrange them in groups, either by copying them into directories or using tags (in Windows Vista).
3. Photo panning is inserted automatically. As far as I know, the pan effect is applied at random, so sometimes it's just right and sometimes it's completely wrong for a given photo. Expect to spend a fairly large amount of time adjusting these.
4. Everything in Photo Story is associated with a photo. Audio tracks, for example, start at, move with, and are deleted with the photo to which they are attached.
5. If an audio track ends in the middle of a photo, Photo Story will trim the audio track (with a fade out) at the end of the previous photo. You may need to adjust the duration of your photos so that the audio track and a photo end at the same time.
6. If you want to fade in a caption (or part of one), load the same photo in twice and put them back-to-back. Add the caption to the second one. You may need to adjust or remove the panning effect from the first photo. When the show fades from the first picture to the second, only the caption will change.