DVD Maker lets you create professional looking DVDs that match the theme of your home movie or photo slideshow. You can also customize the DVD even more by adding a disc title, a notes page and editing the menu text.

Windows DVD Maker

Windows DVD Maker is only good for burning previously created projects. It doesn’t have many options for effects or transitions, etc. I’ll first write how to use it to create a super simple photo slideshow that you can burn to DVD using Windows DVD Maker, but at the end I’ll also mention other programs you can use to first create nicer photo slideshows before burning them to DVD. ..

Windows DVD Maker lets you create professional-looking menus for DVDs that include photos and Windows Vista or 7. So if you have a lot of photos and want to make a slideshow to watch on your TV, then Windows DVD Maker is the perfect tool for you! ..

Windows DVD Maker is a program that can be used to create a DVD from a digital file. ..

To add pictures or videos to your DVD project, click the Add items button.

To add photos to a slideshow, browse to the location of your picture folder and select all of the photos desired. You will then see a slideshow folder in the list with the number of pictures. If you have more pictures from a different folder, you can add those too and they will be added to the slideshow folder. ..

You can choose between a traditional DVD menu or a custom one that is specifically designed for your DVD. You can customize the text, the layout, and even the colors of your menu.

First, you can choose to have a slideshow play automatically when you open the app or set a schedule. You can also choose to have it play only when someone clicks on it. Finally, you can choose to have it play continuously or stop after a certain amount of time.

You can add music to the slideshow, change the slide show length to match the music length, change the length of time each picture is displayed, change the transition type used for each picture and choose whether to pan and zoom the pictures. It’s basic, but it will get the job done for a lot of people.

Once you have finished customizing the settings, go ahead and click Burn! That’s really all there is to it! The DVD will be burned and you’ll now have your own slideshow on DVD.

Windows DVD Maker can encode a movie for you to create a DVD. The encoding process takes more time than burning, so you’ll have to wait a while depending on your computer’s speed. ..

If you don’t have access to Windows DVD Maker, there are a few other options. One of my favorites is DVD Slideshow GUI, which is free. ..

DVD Slideshow GUI

The DVD Slideshow GUI is a program that uses a bunch of free tools that are already available and packages them together into a nice GUI interface. Once you install it and run it, go ahead and click on Slideshow and then Add Pictures and Videos.

When you add a new picture to your slideshow, you’ll see a list of all the pictures in your slideshow with some information like Duration (slide), Animation, Transition and Duration (transition). The durations are in frames and the transitions are randomly selected by default when you load the pictures. ..

You can change all of these settings, of course, by simply right-clicking on any picture. It will instantly bring up the slide settings dialog box.

You can choose any photo editor from the list on the left to create a DVD slideshow with your photos.

You can animate the images by selecting one, clicking on Slideshow and then clicking on Animation. You can basically zoom, pan and rotate the images using this tool.

You can preview the slideshow by just double-clicking on any photo in the slideshow. Once you have completed the slideshow, click on File and then Project Settings.

To create a slideshow:

  1. Choose the resolution and format for the slideshow, aspect ratio, whether to include pre or post process effects, and adjust the quality of the animations.
  2. Click File and then choose Burn to Disk to burn your slideshow to CD or DVD.
  3. The program also has the option to export it as a movie file or upload it to YouTube.

Microsoft Photo Story 3

Photo Story 3 is a software program that runs on Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1. Once you install it, you can start a new story on the wizard. ..

To create a slideshow with pictures imported from your computer, on the next screen click on Import Pictures. Once loaded, you’ll be able to click on a picture in the grid at the bottom and then click on the small buttons to correct color levels, remove red eye, rotate or edit. ..

When you click on Edit, you can rotate and crop the photo, auto fix it or add effects. You can also apply one effect to all the pictures if you like.

  1. Add titles to each photo and adjust the justification and font using the buttons directly above the text box.
  2. Choose an effect for each picture from this screen.

Photo Story is a great program because you can add narration to your photos, which is a unique feature. I still recommend it because of this feature. ..

If you click on the Customize Motion button, you can add any zoom/pan and transition effects here. I also like having the ability to choose the exact parts of an image that I want to zoom in on rather the program randomly deciding.

You can now add music to your slideshow by either selecting MP3 files or you even have the crazy option of creating your own music on the fly by combining various pre-set music tunes, changing the tempo, etc.

You can either save your photo story to your computer, which is the option to choose if you want to burn it to DVD later. It basically saves the file out as a WMV file, which you will then just add to Windows DVD Maker to burn to DVD.

You can adjust the resolution and quality of the saved video to create photos slideshows and burn them to DVDs, email them, upload them to YouTube or simply save them to your computer.