Create a Snazzy Slide Show

Share Your Slide Shows

All that's great, but what if you want to send your slide show to friends? As long as they also have Windows XP, you're in business. (If you're sending slide shows to folks without XP--or you're not sure what they have--you might just want to use slide show software. See "Try Your Hand at PhotonShow" for details.)

Nonetheless, the easiest XP solution is to simply copy images to a CD; when your friends put the CD in their PC, the same slide show option appears in the task pane of the CD window. Your recipients will see a dialog box as soon as they insert the CD--one of the options is to "View a slide show of the images."

But how, you might be wondering, do you make a CD? It's easy. Assuming your Windows XP PC has a CD-RW drive, just do this:

1. Place a blank CD-R disc into your computer's CD-RW drive. If you see a helpful Windows dialog box asking what you'd like to do with this disc, just click Cancel.
2. Open a folder that includes pictures you want to copy.
3. Select the pictures. Hold down the Ctrl key while you click to make multiple selections.
4. When you're done selecting images, click Copy to CD from the Picture Tasks on the left side of the folder.
5. If you have more pictures to copy, open the next folder and repeat the selection process until you've put as many images on the CD as you want.
6. You haven't actually copied the pictures to the CD; you have just put them in a temporary holding bin. Double-click My Computer and then double-click the CD drive. You should see a folder with a list of all your pictures, waiting to be copied to CD.
7. Finally, click Write these files to CD--it's listed in the CD Writing Tasks on the left side of the folder. This process can take a while, especially if you've selected a lot of images. When Windows is done, you can remove the CD and give it away as a portable slide show.
8. Note: Windows XP lets you copy images onto a CD without using third-party software, such as Roxio's Easy CD & DVD Creator 6. Your optical drive probably came bundled with one of many popular packages. However, during our informal tests, Windows wasn't able to finish the job on an older XP system. We had no trouble copying the files to the temporary spot, but after several attempts we kept getting the same error message as we came close to the end of the copying phase; the resulting CD-R discs contained nothing. In this case, we had to use CD-burning software to handle the task. (See "How to Burn Without Getting Singed" for step-by-step instructions on how to burn successfully using Roxio's and Ahead Software's programs.