Digital Focus: Make a CD Slide Show

Feature: Slide Shows Made Easy

My cousin recently stopped by for a visit after spending a few weeks in China. She brought several dozen images that chronicled her voyage through the ancient and picturesque country. Thirty years ago, she might have showed the photos with a slide projector or a photo album. Liz had a much more modern solution: She connected her laptop to my television and let Windows XP change the pictures automatically while she narrated the slides from the comfort of the couch.

Windows XP Makes It So

You may not expect something as genuinely useful as an automated slide show to be a standard part of Windows, but it is--in Windows XP, that is. I've written before about how useful Windows XP is for digital photographers; this is yet another reason to upgrade if you haven't already. Believe it or not, Microsoft makes it so easy to create slide shows from your digital photos that you can have one up and running minutes after transferring pictures from your camera to your PC.

You create your slide show by simply clicking a link in the task pane of whatever folder you've copied your pictures to on the hard disk. Try this: Copy images to a new folder on your hard disk. Open the folder and look on the task pane, the column of links that lines the left side of the folder. Since Windows automatically figures out that the folder is full of pictures, it places picture tasks at the top of the pane. The first item you'll see is "View as a Slide Show." Click it, and Windows launches a full-screen slide show of the images, automatically advancing slides once every five seconds.

Once the slide show starts, you'll see a small navigation control at the top right corner of the screen. If you don't see it, just wiggle your mouse and the control will appear. You can use that navigation bar to pause or step through slides manually.

Viewing Your Slide Show

That's all well and good, but you may not keep your PC near your TV. What if you want to show your slide show in the living room? You can do what my cousin Liz did: She burned the slides onto a CD-R, then put the disc in a notebook and connected it to my TV. This is also easy, assuming you have a CD-RW drive in your PC. If you do, just stick a blank CD-R into the drive and wait a few movements. In the picture folder, click "Copy all items to CD" and let Windows do its magic.

When you place that CD-R in another Windows XP computer, you can run a slide show just as if the images were still on the hard disk. What if you place the disc in a computer that isn't running XP? Not a problem--you can still view the pictures, though you won't be able to play a slide show. Either way, it's a great way to share pictures with friends and family.

What if you don't have Windows XP? You can still make your own slide shows, but you'll need to invest in special software. Two of the best programs for this task are Sonic's MyDVD and Ulead's DVD Picture Show.