WiFi Savvy

Last week I told you about Photo Story 3, a great way to make a movie from your photos. But, once you get the movie completed, then what? It plays great on your computer, but the people you want to share it with aren’t sitting next to you, they may be scattered all over the country.

Photo Story 3 can render your movie small enough to send as an email attachment, but it’s awfully tiny. If you have your own website, you can upload the full-size video (a .wmv file ) and set up a link so people can download and view it. This will be the highest quality. Macintosh users won’t be able to view it properly though - see the comments to last weeks’ post. Uploading videos to Youtube.com is probably the most popular method of sharing videos. That is really quite easy. You need to set up a Youtube account - it’s free - then use their ‘upload’ tool to get your video online.

Here is a video I just made for this blog post. It is 7 photos with music and narration added by Photo Story 3. I used all three of the above techniques to share it with you. You can click on each of them to see the difference.

1. Email size video: 269k

2. Full-size .wmv file hosted on my website: 2.23 megabytes, be patient!

3. Full-size .wmv file uploaded to Youtube.com you will need the Flash viewer. Those are three choices, but there is a 4th - and it’s my favorite. Use Picasa! You’ve probably heard of Picasa for managing your digital photos. Picasa makes it one-click easy to upload your photos to a web album. If you want to learn how, watch the videos on my website. Web Albums are provided free of charge courtesy of Google, the owner of Picasa. What many people don’t know is that Picasa will upload videos to your web album as well as photos.

4. Full-size .wmv file uploaded to Picasa Web Album

Both Youtube and Picasa Web Albums convert the movie to a flash format and compress it. The quality suffers in the process, but I think the Picasa version is at least as good as the Youtube, and I like having the video in the same location as all my photos. Chris Guld www.GeeksOnTour.com

Photo Story 3 is a free program that will make movies from your digital photos. You can download Photo Story from Microsoft’s website. That’s right, I said Free. And, I also said Microsoft. Those are two words that normally don’t go together! Take advantage of it. This is a great program. It takes your digital still photos and turns them into a movie, complete with movement, music, and narration. Here’s a sample using photos we took at the Grand Canyon. Notice how the images pan left and right or zoom in and out, it feels like you’re watching a video when it’s actually still photos. You can use music clips from your library, or you can let Photo Story 3 compose the music for you. Notice how the music even ends right on time!

This links to a .wmv file, it may take a minute to download. PCs will play it using Windows Media Player. If you’re using a Mac, you may need to download a Media Player. Another example is located on our website - this one is of one of our favorite RV parks and it includes some narration. It was uploaded to Google Video and should play on any computer.

We mostly think of Photo Story 3 for taking our travel photos and making a nice show. Adding some other graphics, and plenty of narration, you can create any kind of presentation. Here is an introduction to Geeks on Tour created completely in Photo Story 3. This one has been converted to Flash and should be viewable by any computer if you have the Flash player installed.

Of all the seminars we teach, Photo Story 3 is the easiest - you’ll find the class handout at the bottom of the Geeks on Tour Articles page. Just gather your photos together, and follow the wizard in the program. You’ll LOVE it.