The problem: a teacher at my school
is holding a meeting for potential parents of next year's kindergarten class.
She has about 46 digital photos illustrating a typical day for her students,
that she would like to show while she's talking about her program. She has
access to a computer on a cart, a screen, and a digital projector, but she has
no experience creating a digital slideshow.
More and more people
want to use a digital projector and a series of digital photos to accompany a
spoken presentation... or just run a series of photos with music.
A first
impulse might be to create a Powerpoint presentation-- Powerpoint has become
ubiquitous and seems to be almost as well known as Coca-Cola, or Kleenex, or
Xerox.
But for many users, Powerpoint may be overkill... if you don't
already have a copy, it's expensive, whether purchased on its own or as part of
Microsoft Office. And it's time consuming to learn to work with it, and even if
you're familiar with Powerpoint, creating a presentation with these 60 digital
photos would take a while, as 46 slides would have to be created, one for each
photo.
(OpenOffice.org is a free office-suite replacement for Microsoft
Office; it can be downloaded from http://www.openoffice.org and can be
recommended for people not wanting to buy a copy of Microsoft Office. But
OpenOffice.org's Impress presentation module, while Powerpoint-compatible, is as
complex to learn and use as Powerpoint).
(Note
that I used Irfanview for helping to make all the images used in this tutorial).
While the OpenOffice.org download is a hefty 80 MB or so, Irfanview's install
file weighs in under one MB. Many thanks to the Bosnian programmer, Irfan
Skiljan for creating and continuing to maintain Irfanview, and for making this
useful piece of software freely available).
Besides helping my colleague
learn to make a slideshow for her parent meeting, I regular use Irfanview's
slideshow feature; some examples:
we made a slideshow
that is projected during the school's Remembrance Day (November 11) assembly,
along with a recording of a bugle
we make a slideshow
with baby and present-day photos of members of each year's graduating class for
use during their school-leaving ceremony
I make Windows screen
savers from photos of the students in each class, setting them up as the screen
saver in their classroom and in the computer lab
a slideshow of photos
of each student and from around the school plays on an infinite loop on a
computer set out in the hallway during 'meet the teacher' nights at the
beginning of each school year.
At home, I regularly
make a screen saver with photos each time I come back from
holiday.
Most of my examples are
school-based, but I'm sure you can think of examples for your work or
home. In
Irfanview's File menu, there's a Slideshow option. This can be used to create a
basic slideshow in a manner of minutes that can be used in a variety of ways.
Let's take a look:
It's quite a
busy dialogue box; it won't win any awards for sleek design. But it packs a lot
of functionality into a relatively small amount of space. Navigate to a folder
full of pictures that you want to use.
When you see the file names of
your images, you can select individual pictures; when a picture is selected, a
preview appears in the lower left corner.
Clicking the Add
buttonlets you add
images one at a time; clicking the Add
All button lets you add all the photos in the folder. You can navigate to
a different folder and add photos from there as well... repeat as needed until
all your photos are listed in the space on the left:
Notice that the image-list on the left
includes the full folder path for each photo, making it difficult to see the
actual file names, though you can use the scroll-bar along the bottom to make
the display more useable. If you click a file-name in that left-hand list, the
photo will again be displayed in the Preview window.
Ideally, you are
happy displaying your images in the order they're listed... if not, you can
select an image, and use the Move Up or
Move Down buttons to move it to a new
place in the list. Repeat as needed until your images are in the order you
want.
Look at the various options in the lower-right area of the dialogue
box. You can set your slides to advance automatically or randomly after a
pre-set time-- to get a time longer than 9.999 seconds, you'll need to delete
one of the decimal points. That will let you set the time to something like
25.00 seconds.
Alternatively (and more usefully for the teacher I
mentioned at the beginning), you can set the slides to advance after mouse or
keyboard input-- again automatically or randomly.
Note that even if you set a time delay, a mouse or
key press can still be used to move to the next slide or back to the previous
one. (At least if you've saved your slideshow as an EXE file; if saved as an SCR
screensaver, any mouse movement or keypress exits the screensaver). Click the
right mouse button (or press the Right arrow key) to proceed to the next slide;
the left mouse button (or the Left arrow key) goes to the previous
slide.
You can set your slideshow to loop until stopped (the
default); unchecking that option means the slideshow will exit after the last
slide. You can also loop background music files, and to ensure that in a
randomized slideshow, each image only appears once.
Click on the Advanced options button:
Most of these control how the slides are sorted...
if you manually rearranged the images in the list, check and make sure it's set
to no Sort.
Check the Fullscreen options button:
If you are using images that are smaller than the
size of the screen, you may want to choose whether to display them stretched to
screen size or at their original size. Either way can cause problems; too small
images may not be very effective, but stretched to too large a size, they may
appear grainy: pixellated. If you're working with digital photos, these days
most are larger than typical screen size, making this less of a
problem.
The Add Text options do
not let you add different text with each image; you can have a standard caption
appear throughout the slide show, or show the file name and other similar
information for each image using the codes listed. If you choose to use text,
you can set the colour, size, and font. (A simpler version of this appears in
the main Slideshow dialogue).
Aside: In
the main Irfanview program, you can add text to images (one at a time)-- to do
this, select the area where you want text to appear, then press Control + T...
you can enter the text you want. Note the Text
is transparent option to overlay text without erasing the background
image.
By clicking the Choose Font button, you can change the font
used and the font size, style, and colour. Be sure to save your image after
adding text. Repeat as needed.
When you've got the images
listed in the desired order, and the various options in the main Slideshow
dialogue and (optionally) the Advanced and Fullscreen dialogues set as desired,
click the Save as EXE/SCR file button.
More useful options here. An EXE file runs on its
own, while an SCR file can be used as a Windows screen saver (best if copied
into the C:\Windows folder). Creating an SCR file can be a handy way to have
your vacation photos (or photos of all the students in your classroom) appear
automatically whenever your computer is not in use. (Note: double-clicking an
SCR file will run it, just as with an EXE file, but clicking the mouse will shut
down an SCR screen saver, while it can be used to change the slide in an EXE
slideshow presentation). You don't need to have Irfanview installed on a
computer in order to use either an EXE or SCR slideshow, by the way.
My
teacher colleague wants an EXE file so that she can manually move from one slide
to the next as she talks to the parents.
Most often, we probably want the
default fullscreen mode; the Window mode, with a window size smaller than the
screen size will let some of the computer background appear behind the
slideshow.
Finally, you can choose the location for the saved file and a
file name. (Note that Irfanview remembers the location and name from the last
time you created a slide show).
When you're ready, click Create. The computer will be busy for a little
while, depending on the computer's power, the size of the photos, etc. On this
Pentium 4 (2 GHz), creating a slideshow from the 46 Kindergarten photos took
about 6 seconds. With a little practice, you can probably create a usable
slideshow from a large bunch of photos in 2 minutes or so, assuming you don't
need to do much fiddling with slide order. Note that these files can be large:
the folder with the 46 kindergarten photos took up 29 MB of space. Similarly,
the slideshow that Irfanview created from those photos took up pretty much the
same 29 MB.
Adding
music
You can have background music in your Irfanview-created
slideshow... to do this, add an MP3 music track before the slide where you want
it to start playing in the list of images. It will (by default) loop until
another MP3 file is encountered, at which point the next music file will start
playing. (If there's only one MP3 file listed as the first file in the list, it
will continue playing throughout the slideshow, though if the slideshow is set
to repeat, the song will start over from the beginning each time the slideshow
goes back to slide #1).
Note: by default, the slideshow dialogue only shows
'common graphic files'... you have to change it to show 'All Files' . In order
to work with MP3 files in this way, you should have the Irfanview plugins
(available from http://www.irfanview.com)
installed. Nicely, you don't need either the Irfanview or the plugins installed
in order to play the musical slideshow on another
computer. That's about it... what you
don't get that you could do (with more work) in Powerpoint or OpenOffice.org's
Impress:
You only get one image
per slide. In Powerpoint (etc), you might choose to have more than one image on
a slide
You can't mix images
with text, charts, etc as is common in Powerpoint presentations. (Though if you
wanted, you could use a simple paint program like Windows Paint to make graphics
with text on them, or to add text on top of your digital photos, then use those
saved graphics in your Irfanview slideshow. Similarly, you could copy Excel
charts to the clipboard and paste them into Irfanview or Windows Paint, to make
images for a slideshow).
You don't get nice
transitions between slides, letting slides fade one into the other, or appear as
window blinds or what have you. Similarly, you can't animate portions of a
slide, having a photo slide in from the side or something.
You don't get to have
different timings for different slides
If you need any of those
features, you're better off with Powerpoint or the free OpenOffice.org Impress.
(And you may want to check out my Introduction to Powerpoint
or Introduction to Impress
tutorials). But the ability to use Irfanview to create a 'quick and dirty'
simple screen saver or presentation in a matter of minutes with little training
can be very worthwhile.
Alan Zisman is a Vancouver educator, writer, and
computer specialist. He can be reached at E-mail Alan