The pictures were taken with 35mm and APS cameras and sent to
Clubphoto for developing.
We pay some crazy annual fee to them on the order of $20 which allows us to do things
like keep a bunch of
albums stored on their servers "permanently", and also allows us to do high resolution
dowloads (as an aside, we've made 8x10 reprints from these downloaded digital images,
and they look great). After downloading our images, I then brightened, darkened, or
cropped some of the
pictures to correct for under or over-exposure as well as human-error things like
taking the picture with the camera tilted or something. I do all of my image editting
with Ulead Photoimpact.
Recommendation: Get a digital camera and cut out the middle-man (Clubphoto), but if
you're going film, Clubphoto is great. Photoimpact
is a great application at a reasonable price that gets my endorsement.
To create the slideshow, I used
Sierra Imaging's Image Expert 2000. We got it free with our computer, and I guess it
was adequate. I've got to think there is an easier to use application out there though.
It's got a lot of features that we didn't use (like adding audio to your slideshow).
We did use the ability to add titles, and
descriptions to images and arrange them into a slideshow. It also gives you this archaic
little application called "Player" that allows any computer to play your slideshow. I spent
many hours getting this application to work correctly with the CD launcher software.
Recommendation: Don't buy a Sierra Imaging or Jasc Software product to do your slideshow.
Buy an application that is exclusively for slideshow creation. Image Expert tries to do too
much.
I found the screensaver software on Cnet's download
area. Just do a search on something like "create screensaver".
Cnet is the best place that I've found to get freeware, shareware, and downloadable
software sometimes for a small fee.
I used
Screensaver Builder. I downloaded it and tried it out, then paid $15 for a license
that allowed me to distribute the screensaver (without the license your screensavers are
splashed with "unlicensed screensaver" or something)
Recommendation: I do like Screensaver Builder but it was a bit difficult to use.
I used v2.44 and I see they're up to 3.11 now, so maybe some of the stuff is cleaned up
a bit. I recommend it as a good product, but I suggest you first do the search on Cnet
and see what's available free that might fit your application.
This was by far the most annoying step in the process. I first had to do some up-front
research on how to create a CD that launches an application when you insert it, then I
had to decide if that "application" was one I should create myself, or again download
from somewhere. The key word to know for auto-launching a CD is "autorun". The autorun.inf
file does the trick. I decided to use CDStarter to take care of the whole thing. You'll
find it at Cnet.com if you do a search on "autorun cd". I see they have version 2.1.1
there now. I used version 2.0.0. This is the application that 1) enabled the CD to run
automatically when you insert the CD, 2) splashed that picture of us and the glacier to
grab your attention, then 3) it created that simple little screen that has the 3 buttons on
it to access the contents. (Another aside... For our full trip photo album, I spent a little more time on this
portion of the CD creation, and
that screen with the buttons looks a lot nicer. There are pictures on the buttons and it
is formatted a bit better.) I carefully threw everything together on the CD. If you
enable viewing of hidden files on your computer, you'll see all the files I had to move to
the CD to get it to work.
One thing to be careful of here is that it is very easy to make a CD that only works
on computers that have their CD drive mapped to the same drive letter as yours (for example
mine is E:). Make sure nothing in your final product uses that specific
letter, otherwise it won't work on so-and-so's computer that has drive G: mapped
as their CD drive. I tested the CD on a Windows95 computer and a WindowsXP computer with
different drive letters to test out all of the potential OS and drive bugs.
Recommendation: CDStarter was difficult to use. It took me many iterations before I
had a product that was suitable for distribution, but again, the newer version might fix
some of the complexity problems. This step in the process is tough to manage because you
have to combine several applications that were never meant to work together. I don't
know if such an application exists, but if you find one that can create a
slideshow/screensaver
then burn it in a nice presentation to a CD, buy it.
I created the label with the software that came with my
CD Stomper Pro system. CD Stomper
provides a starter kit of labels, software, and a device that allows you to cleanly put
labels on a CD. The software that came with the stomper was
SureThing CD Labeler. It
did a good job on simple labels, but I ended up paying a few bucks for an upgrade to the
deluxe edition. I forget exactly why; I think it was to allow infinite flexibility in
label size and layout.
Recommendation: I like SureThing and recommend it. It allows a lot of creativity in
labeling.