OT: Photo CD software

Can anyone suggest some suitable software (not bothered if it's a 'traditional' program or one of these new-fangled 'app' things) for creating photo CDs please?

It's got to be:

*Preferably free (although she's not averse to a small cost) *Run on Windows 8.1 *Easy to use *Capable of producing photo/video CDs to play in stand-alone players (display on TV) not just computers

A friend of mine is 76 years old and wants to be able to put some old family photos on CD/DVD then take the disc round to her 82 year old friend and play them as a slideshow on her TV. She asked me how she could do that and I said that I didn't know but would ask some people far more knowledgeable than I, which is where you folks come in

Reply to
Steve
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It appears Windows DVD Maker or Media Centre will do it

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Not sure how 'easy' it is - if it will bulk import or needs every picture adding separately.

Owain

Reply to
spuorgelgoog

Thanks Owain, I'll have a look.

Reply to
Steve

It's been years and years (15 maybe) since I saw a Photo CD.

They were done in labs by Kodak and stored pictures in multiple resolution packages for each picture, so you got thumbnails, up to big (for the time) resolution images.

This was them:

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To make one, this page seems to tell:

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Reply to
HarpingOn

I *think* my dvd player slideshows jpeg files without the need for any pc software. Details of the player would be helpful I imagine

Reply to
stuart noble

Almost any of the basic cut a CD/DVD with JPEGs ought to be able to do this but not all TVs will play them. Saving JPEG files onto an sD or USB stick might also work OK if the TV is modern enough.

Remember to rotate the images so that down is down in portrait mode as not all TVs honour the image rotation flag. If you can say what model of TV or player the friend has it is possible someone will know exactly what its capabilities for playing image CD/DVD are. You will almost certainly need to write it as a disk at once closed session.

The basic Windows software should do it OK if you drag and drop JPEG or BMP images onto a CD and then write it "disk at once" or close and finalise the session. The former is slightly more reliable.

Ironically what she will actually want is a basic JPEG PictureCD but perhaps at a higher resolution than the original poxy Kodak offering.

PhotoCD was their proprietor y professional 6Mpixel film scanning service encoding onto gold archive quality CDs. I still have some and they were for their time extremely good.

Unfortunately their marketing department launched a new product also acronymed as PCD namely PictureCD. This was a barely 1Mpixel scan poorly encoded with JPEG. You only got caught out once and went and bought a NIkon Coolpix Scanner. Kodak went bust despite having a significant lead in digital imaging at one point. Bayer worked for them.

Reply to
Martin Brown

I only ever ordered a Picture CD once, as it was a free offer, and I quickly realised that the resolution of its images was lower than on the glossy 4"x6" prints delivered at the same time. Now I see why. What a waste. Someone tried to tell me that I had to reset the PC screen attributes to enable the resolution that had to be in there. Phooey, they were terrible, and nothing was going to improve them.

Reply to
Davey

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