Ambitions That Burn

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday December 3, 2007

Helen Bradley

Get some blank CDs, copy some images and share your memories, writes Helen Bradley.

SHARING digital photos is a lot easier and much less expensive than sharing prints. Armed with a fistful of blank CDs and some software you can create slideshow CDs that play in any Windows computer easily and quickly. A good program for managing this is Google's Picasa, which you can download from picasa.google.com. Once installed, Picasa automatically indexes and displays the photos on your computer. If a folder of photos doesn't appear automatically in the display, choose File > Add Folder to Picasa and you can add any folders on your computer or a shared folder on your network. Once added, the images will be accessible inside Picasa.

To create a CD slideshow, create an album in Picasa and add the images to it so you can burn them to a CD. To do this, locate the first image to add to the CD, select it and then right click and choose Add to Album. Click New Album, type a new album name and click OK. Continue to add the other images to the album - you won't need to create it again, simply right click, choose Add to Album and select the album name from the dialogue.

Adding images to an album doesn't create a duplicate of the images on your disk; all it does is create a link to where they are already stored. When you have collected all the images to use in your CD, make sure they are rotated right way up. If they need correction, you can fix them by double-clicking an image and using the adjustment tools.

When you are happy that all the images are ready for burning to your CD, click the Gift CD button. From the bottom of the screen, select the Include Slideshow checkbox to include a slideshow on the disk and then determine whether to reduce the size of the images. If you're using large pictures, it makes sense to reduce the image size to about 1600 x 1200 pixels.

In the Name the Gift CD area, type a name for your CD. Check the Include Picasa checkbox to include a copy of Picasa on the disk. Then if your recipient doesn't have a program to view the images they can use Picasa to do so. Insert a blank CD into your CD drive and click Burn disk to burn your gift CD.

To complete the process, print a photo to use as the disk insert. Click an image from the collection you burned onto your disk and click the Print button at the bottom of the Picasa dialogue. Choose Tools > Options > Printing tab and from the Available Print Sizes area choose CD Cover Size from one of the dropdown lists. Click Apply and then click OK.

From the Print Layout options select CD Cover Size. To crop and size the image so it will fit the square CD cover, click the Crop To Fit button.

Click the Printer Setup button to configure your printer, then click Print. Trim the image and put it in your CD case. Your recipient can now place the CD in his or her computer drive and play it.

Reader tip

From Anthony Huynh of Punchbowl comes this handy tip for assigning letters of your choice to your disk drives. "Windows automatically assigns letters to your drives and when this doesn't suit your needs you can change them. Click Start, right click My Computer and choose Manage. Under Computer Management locate and click Disk Management and, in the right pane, you'll see your drives listed with your CD-ROM drives at the bottom of the pane. Right click the drive or device to change and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths. Click Change, click Assign the following drive letter, click the drive letter you want to assign, and click OK to confirm the choice."

Published tips earn their authors a copy of Norton 360 for Windows XP and Windows Vista ($129.95) or Norton AntiVirus V10.0 for Mac ($59.95), courtesy of Symantec Australia. Submit your original tips (100 words or fewer) and postal address, to icontips@helenbradley.com.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home