free and easy slideshow maker?

[Steelsun]

Looking for a free & easy slideshow maker I can point my Mom to.
She wants to make slideshows of some of her images and send them to friends and family.

Any suggestions?

[Davidtxs]

Have you tried Windows Movie Maker ? Its pretty simple and straight forward you can add sounds or music etc

[kenw]

either windows movie maker that David mentioned or Picasa from Google.

Picasa requires absolutely no setup other than to put them in the same folder and arrange them in order. No music, no fades, but hey, it's brutally simple. and free, too. And it makes a fair editor for the novice (crop, rotate, sharpen, effects, etc).

[my3peas]

www.animoto.com is nearly free.

[Steelsun]

Thanks all.
I'll send the recommendations to Mom!

[CCGamer]

If this is for Windows, try Photo Story 3 for Windows. Free and still available. It's got music, transitions, lots of features - but only saves files as .wmv
Can save stories at a variety of sizes as appropriate for the medium, but be careful when putting several hundres photos into a single story - it gets 'quidgy'... and the different music tracks won't sync right - but smaller stories work great...

[kenw]

Originally Posted by CCGamer

If this is for Windows, try Photo Story 3 for Windows. Free and still available. It's got music, transitions, lots of features - but only saves files as .wmv
Can save stories at a variety of sizes as appropriate for the medium, but be careful when putting several hundres photos into a single story - it gets 'quidgy'... and the different music tracks won't sync right - but smaller stories work great...

just a note: on Photostory, if you have a large number of pics, it helps to resize the pics BEFORE you add them to drop the file size. The sluggishness comes from the computer trying to crunch a 100+MB show and having to use the drive as a cache.

I once had one with about 70 fullsize pics (2MB each) and it took a mas macho P4 machine to its knees.....resized each pic to the screen size, 72dpi with low to moderate compression and it sailed right thru it.

another note on Photostory: unlike most slide show presenters, the slide show file that results (that you can share) does NOT contain the actual images in a format that can be copied. The user can copy the entire show, but can't cull out pics. I'm sure there is a way for the determined to steal the pics but it isn't simple to the average viewer.

[CCGamer]

Originally Posted by kenw

just a note: on Photostory, if you have a large number of pics, it helps to resize the pics BEFORE you add them to drop the file size. The sluggishness comes from the computer trying to crunch a 100+MB show and having to use the drive as a cache.

I once had one with about 70 fullsize pics (2MB each) and it took a mas macho P4 machine to its knees.....resized each pic to the screen size, 72dpi with low to moderate compression and it sailed right thru it.

another note on Photostory: unlike most slide show presenters, the slide show file that results (that you can share) does NOT contain the actual images in a format that can be copied. The user can copy the entire show, but can't cull out pics. I'm sure there is a way for the determined to steal the pics but it isn't simple to the average viewer.

Yep - you are certainly right about that. I've mistakenly (but successfully) created a 300+ image slideshow without first resizing any image first. It'll do it, but take a while to render. My problems came when dropping in various music tracks which didn't want to sync up with (start & stop) on specific images. The audio tracks just started acting flaky...
But that only happened on a really large slide show for me. Otherwise it works great.