The Computer Vet Weblog

I found out on Channel 9 that Microsoft Photo Story 3 is out now. Although it’s apparently in its third version, I’ve never heard of it before today. (Maybe that’s because until now it was part of the Plus! package, as Paul Thurrott points out in his review.) What Photo Story does is let you build “stories” out of your digital photos, “stories” being slideshows that can have background music, narration, text, and pan and zoom effects (“Ken Burns style”). It’s Windows-only, of course, and it creates a file that can only be viewed in Windows Media Player. But it’s not like Photo Story is the only program that can do this. You could build one of these “stories” in Flash or iMovie, or a bunch of other programs. MS is clearly pushing this as a nice little add-on to Windows, like Movie Maker, that takes only the few features that home users are likely to use most often and wraps it up in a seamless UI. It’s what they’re best at, after all.

I haven’t used the program yet, just looked at a couple of the demos and read about it. But it sounds like you can do some fun stuff with it, going beyond the basic slideshow and jazzing up your digital photos a bit. And when you’re done you’re not completely stuck in Windows Media. You can stick your movie on a VCD or DVD, and from there send it out to anybody to watch.

So I’ll give Photo Story a run through and see if I can make it sing. Paul Thurrott seems sold. He says, “If you use Windows XP, you need to download Photo Story 3 immediately. It’s that good.” I just might have to do that.