Create photo slideshows using Picasa

If you don’t already have Picasa installed, go to http://picasa.google.co.uk, click the Download button and follow the instructions to download and install Google’s free photo-management program. After that, launch Picasa and let it trawl through all the photos on the PC’s hard disk, cataloguing them in date order in a folder tree on the left of the program window and displaying the contents of each folder in the main window as thumbnails. Let’s start by selecting the first photo for our show. (Need to brush up on Picasa? See the Workshop at www.computeractive.co.uk/2240805).

Double-click on the selected thumbnail in the main window to open it for editing. Picasa’s main controls for adjusting photos are in the panel on the left but the feature we want is tucked away underneath the photo where it says Caption. Click once on this, type in a caption for the photograph and then press the Return key. Double-click on the photo to close it and return to the thumbnail view.

Continue selecting and captioning photos as described in the previous step. Picasa has all sorts of ways to organise slideshow photos and some people prefer to create a new folder and copy them there. Alternatively, if they’re in sequence in an existing folder, do as we’re doing here and select the first photo by left-clicking it once and then hold down the Shift key and click on the last one in a sequence to highlight them all. Then click the Video button below the main window.

This opens Picasa’s Video Maker window. The program automatically creates a title slide based on the name of the folder the pictures are stored in and the date the photos were taken. We’re quite happy with this so we’ll leave it. Select a transition style from the dropdown menu on the left, then make sure that Show Captions and Full frame photo crop are selected. Finally, open the Dimensions dropdown menu and select 1024x768 ­ this will produce a slideshow that looks good on most TVs (even large, flat-screen ones).

Let’s have a look at the captions themselves. Click the first thumbnail in the strip at the bottom of the screen and see what the caption looks like. Ours uses the default Arial typeface but we could make it more readable with some editing. With the picture selected, click the Slide tab in the panel on the left and then use the Font commands to select a typeface, size, colour and style. Try a bolder typeface rather than just increasing the size.

There’s no obvious way to change the default caption style setting for the whole slideshow, so that means going through them one at a time. That sounds like a drag but actually since the composition of each photo is different, being able to edit individual captions is an advantage. When the last slide has a caption, add a final text slide at the end for credits and thank yous. Click the Add a new text slide button and type in the caption. Then click the Create Video button.

Picasa then creates the video. Keep an eye on the progress bar at the bottom of the main window to see how things are going. When it has finished, the video is ready to be watched on a PC. However, we want to put it onto DVD so that friends can watch it on a TV so there’s some more work to be done. Click the Export Clip button and then sit back as Picasa turns the video slideshow into a Windows Media Video (WMV) file that can be used to create a DVD.

Next, we have to track down where Picasa has stored the exported video. Start by clicking the Back to Library button at the top of the panel on the left. Look at the top of the folder tree on the left and find the Exported Videos folder, then click on it once to select it. Since this is the first time we’ve exported a video like this, the only item in the folder is the slideshow we’ve just created. To find where it’s stored, right-click on the thumbnail and select Locate on Disk from the pop-up menu.

When the folder window opens, minimise it and then launch a web browser and go to www.dvdflick.net. This is the home of the free DVD Flick program that we’ll use to burn our slideshow onto a DVD that we can watch on the TV. Click the Download button, then click the big orange Download DVD Flick button, then follow the instructions to download and install the program. Accept all the defaults and at the end, make sure ‘Run DVD Flick’ is selected and click Finish.

When DVD Flick loads, click the Add title button at the top of the right-hand panel. Use Windows Explorer to navigate to the folder where the video exported back in Step 7 is stored. Click on it once to select it and then click the Open button. Once DVD Flick has imported the video, it will appear in the main window. Just click the Save Project button on the button bar and then follow the prompts to save it to the hard disk.

With the project safely saved, click the Project Settings button. Click the General button on the left and give the slideshow a title. Leave the other settings as they are so that the Target Size is DVD 4.3GB. Click the Video button and make sure the Target format is PAL (the UK TV standard) and that Encoding is set to Normal. Then click the Burning button and put a tick in the box next to the ‘Burn project to disc’ label. Then click the Accept button to finish.

DVD Flick has loads of features for creating DVDs with professionally styled menus and chapters (see the Workshop in issue 290 or visit www.computer active.co.uk/2247820). As this is a simple slideshow, pop a blank DVD into the disc drive and click the Create DVD button. Because of the options we set in the Step 11, DVD Flick prompts to make sure we’ve put a disc in the drive. Click OK to continue.

As soon as you click OK, DVD Flick starts to do its stuff, opening the ‘engine room’ that makes everything work (a program called Image Burn) and that displays all kinds of technical status messages. In most circumstances, there’s no need to be concerned with or understand anything that’s displayed until the program finishes writing all the information to the DVD and then finalises it. After that, Windows will recognise it as a DVD and offer to play it.

This is all well and good, but the point of the Workshop is to produce a DVD that will work with any DVD player connected to a television. To test it, we ejected the new disc from the PC and placed it in a domestic DVD player connected to a modern flat-screen television. As soon as the disc went into drive the TV switched on, recognised both the player and the disc and started the slideshow. And here’s our photo slideshow with captions being displayed on a TV.