Sharing Digital Photos in Creative Ways
By Sue Chastain
Software for combining digital photos and other images with sound, video, music, text, and special effects to create animated greetings, slide shows, screen savers, photo albums, scrapbook layouts, and interactive presentations that can be distributed via the Web, email, CD, VCD, and DVD. Also includes tools for enhancing your printed photo layouts and for directly connecting with other people to share photos online.
- Screen Saver Software
Screen savers are a fun way to share and display your photo slide shows with animated effects. Many slide show programs give you the option to create a Flash slide show for your own computer, but the specialized screen saver software should allow you to create custom screen savers that can be distributed and run as screen savers by others.
Most screen saver software lets you to add text captions and transition effects. Other features you may find are image effects such as borders and frames, custom backgrounds using textures or gradients, background music, timing controls, and motion effects.
Software that does not allow distribution can be found for under $25. When the screen savers will be distributed, the cost is much higher. Like multimedia authoring software, it's not uncommon to find a tiered pricing structure with one price for personal use, another price for business use, and often a third price for unlimited royalty-free commercial distribution. Be sure you understanding the licensing agreement if you intend to resell or distribute your creations. For instance, a business-use license may allow you to create screen savers with your corporate logo and give them away freely, but if you are reselling them for profit, you'll probably need a commercial-use license.
If you intend to create screen savers for resale, you'll also want to think about whether or not your screen savers will carry your own branding or the branding of the screen saver creation software. In the low-end price range, you may find that your creations contain advertising for the product that was used to create it.
- Slide Shows on CD and DVD
Now that CD and DVD burners are a standard feature in most computers, many slide show programs include features for creating photo slide shows that can play on TV. If your computer has a CD burner, you can create slide shows in VCD, or video CD, format. These shows are lower quality than DVD slide shows and they can only be about 30 minutes in duration.
DVDs can hold about two hours of video, are much higher quality, and can contain multiple shows on one disk. With slide shows on DVD you can also create interactive menus for navigating to the slide shows and individual photos or movies in your slide shows. It is possible to jump directly to a specific point in a slide show if your DVD menu is designed for this.
Slide show programs with CD and DVD burning capabilities usually cost around $50 to $100. It's also worth noting that many video editing suites also allow you to create Video-CD and DVD based slide shows from still photos and your DVD burner may have come with software for this.
- Multimedia Photo Albums
Much of today's digital photo software allows you to organize your digital photo collection into albums with special animated effects and music. The albums can be saved and replayed for your own personal enjoyment, and some software also allows you to publish your albums to the Web or distribute them as self-running files.
Often the software works in conjunction with partner Web sites that offer Web space to the users. This allows users to post photo albums to the Web easily, and usually offers additional benefits such as password protection and community tools such as message boards and chat.
Albums are generally created from templates or themes and the software may include extra backgrounds, clip-art, and sound files. Much of this software allows you to design other creative projects such as calendars and cards using your photos and often includes limited image enhancement functionality also. The cost for this type of software is in the $25 to $80 range.
