Microsoft Photo Story 3

Photo-story is a frustratingly counter-intuitive program that allows very little flexibility for user customisation or preferences.
Some examples of the issues we had with it: Sounds are matched to pictures, so if you want to show a variety of images during a single speech you can’t: you have to record each word/part of the sentence separately and very jerkily. If you want to be clever and use recorded dialogue as “background” music over many pictures, photo-story thoughtfully yet extremely pointlessly auto-fades your music causing you to lose half your script. All images automatically have a transition from the previous image and have random time-consuming “start/end motion”: The screen focuses on part of the image then slowly moves to look at another part of it. If you want a full picture with no fade-in, you have to manually go through every single picture, remove the transition, remove the narrow framing of your picture and set the time that the picture displays to be something more logical than the default “unbearably uncomfortable”. The recording itself is also limited, with the full extent of what could laughably be called "editing" consisting of a “delete” option. The recording options are automatically set to “don’t let user fiddle around with” which would be fine except that each time you try to record sound you’re angrily told to fix your recording settings. I could go on, but suffice to say that the very sight of the program Photo-story 3 fills me with seething disgust. This loathing is compounded by the sad memory of 17 hours of my life wasted, in which at the very least I could have done the same task 17 times on Windows Movie-maker since that program at least lets me do what I want to do if I know what I want (which incidentally is also even more convenient because it’s ALREADY ON YOUR COMPUTER if you have Windows). The only thing I liked about Photo-story 3 (I’m serious; the ONLY thing) was that the “create your own music” option (a fake feature which provides extraordinarily bad generic pre-produced midi “melodies” in a few different synthesisers i.e. no 'creation' per se) made a little tune that ended at the same time as our presentation.

If you have no idea what kind of end result you want for your presentation but have some pictures you'd like to randomly hash together in your lunch break, then by all means take a chance with this program; its default random settings will ensure that no-one realises how little effort you put in to create a messy compliation of pictures.

Keep in mind however that by leaving the fate of your presentation to a program...you're actually leaving it at its *mercy*, not in its care. If you have any inlking of what you want your end result to look like (which, if you're responsible for your own work, you should), then do not expect Photo Story 3 to be able to produce it for you. In all likelihood it won't be able to.

Windows Movie Maker