Turn your holiday photos into a great DVD slideshow!

Much as I love taking photos, sharing them has always been a bit of a chore – either spending ages printing them all out, or crowding everybody around a computer screen. A better option has been to get them on a DVD that people can view on their TV – and now that’s something you can do very quickly and easily.

All you need to do is open up the new Windows DVD Maker program from the Start menu and click Add Items to start building your collection. Alternatively, you can load it from Photo Gallery or your Pictures folder by clicking Burn > Video DVD. If you just want to create a quick collection, follow the steps shown right – DVD Maker will then make a collection of photo slideshows that can be played in any DVD player.

If you want to craft something a bit more personal, that’s easy, too. Once you have chosen the photos to include – you can include over 3,000 on a standard DVD – and you’ve clicked Next to go on to the second screen in the DVD Maker interface, you can customise how the DVD menu works.

One of the biggest improvements you can make over a standard slideshow is to add some music to play in the background. Click the Slide show button at the top of the window and choose Add Music to pick a tune from your hard drive. Select a tune and click Move Up or Move Down to change the running order – if you want to build the show around the music, rather than the photos, check Change slide show length to match music length.

Experiment with the other options, which are very straightforward, and see how you like the results. You can click Preview at any time to see what it’s all going to look like.

1. Pick Your Photos

If you want to burn all of your photos that have a single tag (‘holiday 2007’, for example) click that tag in the left-hand menu in Photo Gallery. You can then click and drag to select those photos, and click Burn > Video DVD.

2. Adding More

If you want a wider range, click the first photo and then choose Burn followed by Add Items to pick some more. Click Views > Extra Large Icons to get a better view of what you’re adding; add a title and click Next when you’re finished.

3. Menu Screen

Here’s where you can choose what the main DVD screen looks like. The quickest option is to just pick a style from the menu on the right – click Preview to see how it will appear on screen. Click Menu Text to change any of the text you can see.

4. Photo Finish

By default, your photos will be arranged into a slide show: the photos will fade into view one after the other. If that’s all you want to see, then click Burn to finish it. Make sure you’ve got a blank DVD in your DVD writer first!

David weeks contributes to Windows Vista: The Official Magazine and is the Windows Client Marketing Manager for Microsoft UK.

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