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Photo to Movie creates panned images, like the ones Ken Burns made famous in his TV series on the Civil War. You will be amazed at the effect.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Sharing photos on Windows and Mac OS X


Sept. 15, 2002


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   What's the best way to share your digital photos? I get asked this question a lot. The answer isn't a simple one.
   You have three choices: Sending individual images as attachments in e-mail, creating Web pages of photos on a photo-sharing site or putting images onto a CD and sending the CDs by regular mail.
   The first option might not work in most cases if your image files are fairly large. Most Internet providers refuse to handle mail attachments larger than a few megabytes, and your Aunt Deb might not like having her mail downloads tied up for half an hour anyway.
   You can send small versions of your photos instead, but you sacrifice quality that way.
   Photo-sharing Web sites have the same liability. In all such sites I've encountered, photos are set to a disappointingly low resolution (to keep Web browsers from bogging down when visitors view the pages), and I find myself wishing for better versions of each picture.
   Image quality aside, the e-mail option has a much bigger problem. Many people have no idea how to deal with attachments in e-mail, and many others do not use e-mail software that handles attachments well anyway. Sending photos by e-mail works only if they are relatively small and the recipient knows how to extract and view them.
   With these limitations, I've become a fan of making CDs (and sometimes DVDs) that contain slide shows of images. My second choice is to send CDs containing photo booklets.
   Experienced Windows and Mac users probably have a half-dozen ways to show images in a slide show, but my technique requires no expertise at all. The method I use most turns still images into computer videos -- into AVI or MPG videos for PCs and QuickTime videos for Macs. I then simply put the video file onto a CD for those who know how to play stand-alone videos on their computers, or sometimes I turn the movie into a video CD or video DVD so it can be viewed on a TV.
   A second method I've used creates a Windows program on a CD. Running that program shows the pictures.
   
   Let's start with the movies made from still photos.
   Many programs let you create a Windows video (called an AVI file) from images. One that's both powerful and easy to use is Platypus Animator, a $20 shareware program from www.c-point.com. Platypus also will save movies as MPG files, which are more compact than AVIs.
   On my Mac, I've used two programs.
   For quick and easy movies from images, I use iPhoto, the image-display software that is free for all Macintosh users. I select the photos I want in the movie and click the "Export" button at the bottom. Then I click "QuickTime" and choose the options.
   I also use a more advanced Mac OS X program, Photo to Movie. It costs $10. Search for it at www.versiontracker.com, a sophisticated download site for Macs and Windows PCs. (Be sure to choose the Mac OS X section.)
   Photo to Movie creates panned images, like the ones Ken Burns made famous in his TV series on the Civil War. You will be amazed at the effect.
   I've made video CDs and video DVDs using Photo to Movie, and I've also made small QuickTime animations for Web pages. I consider Photo to Movie so good that it could be a deciding reason to purchase a Mac instead of a Windows PC.
   (I tried a Windows program that claims to do the same thing and could not get it to do anything. I'll keep trying and let you know what comes of it.)
   The fanciest program I tried is FlipAlbum, a $30 Windows program from www.ebooksys.com. FlipAlbum creates professional-looking electronic photo albums with pages that can be flipped with a mouse click. You can even have FlipAlbum turn the pages for you to automated viewing.
   The Windows version of FlipAlbum has been available for some time. E-Book Systems, which makes FlipAlbum, expects to have a Mac OS X version soon.