Convert Photos To Videos - The Fast, Fun and Easy Way! PhotoStory 3 for Windows

Microsoft Windows Photo Story 3 is one of the easiest photos-to-videos program I've ever used. I've tried Movie Maker, also by Microsoft, but it just took up so much memory and crashes so very often that I gave it up.

Photo Story 3 has a file size of 5.03MB and requires Windows XP, Windows Media Player 10.0 and DirectX 9.0b drivers. And it is totally free. You can download a copy HERE!

Photo Story 3 lets you import pictures with different file extensions. You can crop or rotate pictures, correct contrast, color and red eyes. You can add pan and zoom motion to your pictures, and stunning special effects. It's that easy and fast!

You can also personalize your stories by adding titles, captions and credits. You can also record narration, and add background music. It's that easy and fun!

Finally, you can save your story using the optimal quality settings (called profile) for the way your video story will be played: on your computer, DVDs, VCDs, e-mails or portable devices. Then, you can upload your videos to YouTube and share your stories with millions of Internet users.

Making a photo slide-show or photo montage with Photo Story 3 is easy, fast and fun.

On the Welcome page, click "Begin a new story". Then follow through the following 5 steps to create a new video story.

1. Import and arrange your pictures
2. Add a title to your pictures
3. Narrate your pictures and customize motion
4. Add background music and
5. Save your story.

1. Import and arrange your pictures

For each story, you can import up to 300 pictures, which can be files with .bmp, .dib, .eps, .gif, .jhif, .jpe, .jpeg, .jpg, .pcd, .pcx, .png, .psd, .rle, .tga, and .tif file name extensions.

You can import pictures from your computer, a network folder, or an MSN Groups Web site.

After you import your pictures, they appear in the film strip at the bottom of the page. You can arrange them on the Photo Story film strip in the order you want them to be displayed. Then you can use the editing tools to edit, enhance, rotate, and crop your pictures.

If you import more pictures, Photo Story adds them at the end of the film strip. If it detects that some pictures in your story do not have a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is optimum for computer screen display, it will automatically crop them and also remove black borders from your pictures.

You can select and move only one picture at a time in the film strip. If you want to enhance the appearance of a picture, click on Edit Pictures and you can correct contrast, color levels and red eye.

You can also add special effects to your pictures that change the appearance of your picture such as Watercolor or Black and White.

Photo Story can determine the panning and zooming effects automatically for pictures in your story, or you can choose to control these effects manually in the Customize Motion dialog box. By setting the motion manually, you can select the general areas of a picture that will appear at the beginning and end of the picture's video clip and the duration.

You can also select from 48 transition effects available in Photo Story.

2. Add a title to your pictures

You can personalize your stories by adding titles, captions and credits. You can add a title page at the beginning of your story, and you can add titles to each picture in your story.

You can change the appearance of the title by selecting the font type, style, size, effects, color, and script you want to use.

By default, the title appears in the center of the picture. To change the location of the title, you can select the various alignment buttons.

You can add narration to your pictures and record up to five minutes of speech for each picture. You can type notes for each picture to help you remember what you want to say.

From this narration page onwards, you can check the progress of your work by clicking the Preview button to open the Preview window. Once you are satisfied with what you have done, you can go to the next step of adding music to your story.

4. Add background music

You can add background music that plays during your story. The Select Music option lets you choose a piece of music from your computer, a network folder, or the Internet. The music file can be in Windows Media Audio (WMA), MP3, or WAV format.

The Create Music option lets you customize Photo Story prerecorded pieces and styles of music by selecting the genre, style, bands, mood, tempo, and intensity of the music.

5. Save your story

Photo Story enables you to save your story on several profiles and quality settings depending on what you are going to do with your video story.

You can save your story for playback on your computer, send the story in an e-mail message, create a Video CD (VCD) or a DVD, or save your story for playback on portable devices such as a Pocket PC with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile.

You can also save a project for your story at any time while working on the story by clicking the Save Project button. Give a name to your project and, by default, the story project is saved in your My Videos folder with a .wp3 file name extension. You'll be able to edit it anytime you like.