Digital Focus: How to Buy a Digital Camcorder

Dave's Favorites: Share Your Pictures With PhotoParade

We've all got a hard disk full of digital images. The problem is, what do we do with them? Showing off photos is important--and PhotoParade is a cool little program that makes it a snap to share your favorite images with friends and family.

With PhotoParade you drag and drop any number of photos into a gallery, choose a theme, and then watch the resulting show on your PC. Want to share it? You can load the show onto floppy or send it to others.

That's the basic idea, but the fun is in the details. PhotoParade lets you add titles and captions that appear during the slideshow, crop your photos, remove red eye, and add narration. None of the changes you make affect the original images, which are all preserved safely on your hard disk; only the copies of the photos in your slideshow are changed.

The themes are a blast. There are 46 unique themes available for download from the PhotoParade Web site, all with animation to keep things interesting. The Kitty Playtime theme is best for kids (or perhaps my mom): a cat jumps around the photos as they display. An undersea theme involves fish, scuba divers, and mermaids. Silent Movie displays pictures in sepia on a flickering theater screen. There are also seasonal and holiday themes. You can use the default theme soundtrack or attach your own MP3 track.

It takes just a few minutes to click your way through the slideshow wizard. When you're done, you can save the show to your hard disk, span it across a few floppies, or "e-mail" it. When you choose the e-mail option, you're really uploading the show to a Web server. The program notifies the intended recipient that the show can be downloaded and viewed. To watch it, your friends need to install a small PhotoParade viewer.

It would be nice if PhotoParade had a built-in option to write the slideshow to CD. You can do that yourself with a program like Easy CD Creator, however. The slideshows are fairly compact; a 24-picture show with the default music clocks in around 3MB.

The program comes in three versions: a $19.99 standard edition with four themes, the $29.99 premium version with nine themes, and the complete super version for $39.95.