Review of Microsoft Photo Story 3.0

I just finished making a slide show using Photo Story 3.0 (can't seem to locate the latest version, 3.1). There are plenty of online tutorials out there, so I will focus on the pro's/con's after using the program extensively.

The program has major drawbacks, such as:
- You cannot select a group of slides to shift the order, or apply settings
- You cannot change any default settings. So it is a pain to change the font and duration time for each and every slide
- Font settings are very limited. You can only choose among 16 colours and you cannot add a shadow to the text. The latter is a big problem when you want to have a consistent colour and text position on all your slides.
- Export to Windows Media Video (.wmv) format only and limited resolution settings. It would be nice to export video in a higher resolution than 1024*768 for sharper full-screen mode, or at 425*350 to match youtube.com.

However, all of this was worth it for the one major benefit of Photo Story: the ease of creating slide motions. This feature allows you to zoom in/out of each slide, pan from one side of the other, or any combination. The result is a far more dynamic and interesting way of presenting photos.


< This produces a slide motion from bottom-left to top-right. Each box can easily be enlarged, reduced, or moved to add life to your photos. Pinnacle Studio or Mac iPhoto can do the same thing, but their interfaces are awkward and less intuitive.

Oddly, I also found that the built-in red-eye remover tool worked better here than the one in the Adobe Photoshop CS2 toolbox.