by Terry Currier
Do you have a digital camera, or pictures that you scanned in you and wondered how to show them. The new digital cameras can hook up directly to TVs to show the pictures. Programs like IrfanView will show them on the computer. But, part of taking pictures is showing them to friends and loved ones. Including those not living close to you. So you send the pictures to them hard copy, or as email attachments. Of course if you send a lot of them in the email they will not be friends for long.
3D-Album will help you gather the pictures and show them in
an entertaining way. Very easy to use. They include a tutorial CD (I did
not even both with.) Just select the folder where the pictures you want to use
are. It then looks at the pictures there, and loads them for the preview. You do
have to have all the pictures you want to use in the same folder. You can not
have it look at John wedding pictures folder and then add in the ones from his
bachelor party in a different folder. There is no limit to the number of
pictures you can include other than storage.
You then select which presentation style you want to show it
in. That is actually the hardest part, because the choices are so many and so
great. It ships with 23 built-in styles. There are lots of others available to
download. I in fact now have 81 styles to choose from. Each presentation style
has a number of settings that you can change, including the animation speed,
background color, rotation, size of the picture, and even animated 3D headline
texts. The Photo Organizer will let you view and organize photo images stored
in your computer or network. You can drag and drop the image thumbnails to
change the photo presentation order. If you want, you can have it show your
pictures in random order each time it is shown. Showing the pictures can be automatically
set to changing them at an interval, or have it interactively respond to your
keyboard, or mouse.
Besides adding text to a screen you can also put voice narrations for each photo through the Photo Organizer. Want background music? You can add background sounds or music choosing MP3, WMA, WAVE, or MIDI format.
Click on build and it will create the presentation as an
application. What that means is they will create the files needed for you to
send the disk to Aunt Jeannie and she can view it without needing any special
software. It creates the autorun files so when the disk is put in, the pictures
show automatically in the presentation style you selected. With this you can
also convert your presentations into DVD format to playback on DVD player and
view you presentations on TV.
More choices include being able to create screensavers, HTML pages, ZIP files, and self-expandable EXE files. 3D-Album accepts the following files: image (jpeg, gif, png, bmp), sound (mp3, wma, wave, midi, riff, aif, and rmi). A lot of fun to work with, and makes actual use of all those pictures you’re storing. http://www.3d-album.com
From our December 2003 newsletter
Membership in WINNERS is $20 annually for individuals with $5 for each additional family member. The newsletter is emailed to the members in PDF format.
 |
Winners is a member of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG) is an international, platform-independent, nonprofit corporation (incorporated in Washington, DC) devoted to helping user groups throughout the world. Almost 400 user groups are members of APCUG. http://www.apcug.net/ |