2012 Best Free Slideshow Software Review

The Photo Slideshow Software enables you to make a slideshow of your favorite or memorable photos, and turn multiple pictures into a video file for playback on your PC or other media devices. Besides, using a Photo Slideshow Program, you can easily apply transition effects between images, insert text to display on slides, and add background music or your voice narration to a slideshow. With some of these special effects and attractive addons, you can actually bring your still photos to life in just a few minutes.

The following review focuses on several pieces of free photo slideshow software, including main features, pros and cons, screenshots, etc, so as to help you pick the best photo slideshow application and create a cool slideshow of your photos for sharing with your family and friends.

Photo Slideshow Director HD (iPad App)

Overview

Photo Slideshow Director HD is an excellent slideshow app that lets you use your iPad to organize your digital photos from camera roll, Picasa web albums, Facebook photo albums, Flickr photo sets and create eye-catching slideshows in minutes. It exports slideshows to HD videos for sharing on YouTube and Facebook or for playback on an even bigger screen of your HDTV.

The iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photo-slideshow-director-hd/id457847244?mt=8

Download Photo Slideshow Director HD from the iTunes App Store

Socusoft Photo to Video Converter Free

Overview

Socusoft Photo to Video Converter Free is an absolutely easy-to-use program for creating your slideshows in four quick steps — Add Photos, Select Transition & Music, Preview and Output Video.

Pros: Easy to use, drag-and-drop feature, pan and zoom functions, transition effects with background music or voice, save results in popular mpg format, support video size up to 720x576 pixels.

Cons: Adding text, more output profiles and other advanced features, such as burning slideshows to a DVD disc, are only available to the Pro version.

Download Socusoft Photo to Video Converter (8.07MB)

Photo Story

Overview

Photo Story is a free application that allows users to create a slideshow from their digital photos. The software allows adding narration, effects, transitions and background music to create a Windows Media Video movie file with pan and zoom effects.

Pros: Intuitive and easy to use, rich in features, panning and zooming with various transition effects, crop black borders, add text and soundtracks.

Cons: Save video file in wmv format only, no burning video to CD/DVD is supported.

Download Photo Story (5.0MB)

Windows DVD Maker

Overview

Windows DVD Maker is an application included in premium editions (Home Premium and Ultimate) of Windows Vista, and Windows 7 Home Premium and above editions that is designed to enable the creation of DVD movies that can be played using DVD playback software or on a standalone consumer DVD player.

Pros: Create a slideshow of photos and videos with the music background and transition effects, and burn to DVD disc.

Cons: Cannot publish the project as a video file.

Windows Movie Maker

Overview

Windows Movie Maker is a video creating/editing software application, included in Microsoft Windows Me, XP, and Vista. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie.

Pros: Create a slideshow of photos and videos with the music background and transition effects, and save in wmv format.

Cons: Cannot create DVD disc.

DVD slideshow GUI

Overview

DVD slideshow GUI is a user interface for various great tools needed to make your own slideshow of photos. It is not as easy and intuitive to use as Photo Story but it's packed with more features favored by more experienced users.

Pros: Packed with more features, useful tools to pan, zoom and rotate images with a variety of transition effects, motion backgrounds, borders and subtitles, export to popular video formats, support HD videos, authoring and burning to optical disks.

Cons: Not as easy and intuitive to use as Photo Story, some errors encountered when running the program.

Download DVD slideshow GUI (20.0MB)

Note: The Photo Slideshow Programs reviewed above are all run on Windows platform. If you are looking for a photo slideshow maker that works with Mac OS, you may simply use the pre-installed applications of iMovie and iDVD (comparable to Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker) to help you make a slideshow of your photos. Learn how to create photo slideshow movie with iMovie and burn photo slideshows to DVD with iDVD.

Download Photo DVD Burner Professional