Picture Slide Show Advice

[Deelow]

Hey;
I've been volunteered to make a still picture slide show complete with music for a wedding in May. The more I think about it, the more i realize that I know nothing about that sort of thing. Now I know you can do that stuff in Powerpoint but they always come off looking like crap. Does anyone know of a decent cheap program that makes that kind of stuff simple?...any other tips would be appreciated.
Thanks.

[Maritime Q-Scout]

I'm doing a picture slide show for my program's year end party. I've never found powerpoint looked that bad with them, but I still have to figure out how to keep music playing from slide to slide

[firebug]

iPhoto &/or iMovie. (both free on the mac)

I pity PC users!

[STeeLy]

music could be played using a background program...

So you could have set a play list in something like Windows Media Player... open that up and start your slide show... Other than that, I don't know what you can do.. I'm guessing you could use the very self explanatory Windows movie maker... but its a little more complicated than powerpoint.

[sclitheroe]

You could just play the music in the background using your mp3 player of choice, and run the slideshow through Picasa (picasa.google.com), which is what I had to do recently for an incomplete presentation that was dropped in my lap 15 minutes before go time.

-Scott

[Bobblehead]

If you google you can find programs that organize this for you. The look at how long the music is, and determine how long to show each picture. You may want to look for a few and see if they suit your needs.

Irfanview will do a slidehow for you, if you don't have anything else to cover that part of it.

[FurnaceFace]

For easy, Photo Story 3 for Windows would do. You can find it off the Microsoft site and it's a free download with a certified version of XP (i.e. not pirated, although you can get around that). Like Apple, it lets you setup a slideshow using the Ken Burns Effect which is a much more interesting way to show static images in a slide show.

[Maritime Q-Scout]

just to bump this, and say that we ended up using Windows Movie Maker for our slideshow.

Worked AMAZINGLY well, so easy to use, and allowed for more than one person to work on sections at once then piece them together. 26:10 of pure gold is what we finished with.

I highly reccomend it

[MolsonInBothHands]

I used Pro Show Gold to do the exact same thing for my sisters wedding. It was very simple to use, (simpler to use than Windows Movie Maker), and I was even able to time certain slides with keys lyrics in the songs used. Lots of special effects and transitions readily available too. It isn't free, but, well, you know.

[JBR]

Windows Movie Maker is great.