Over the last two weeks, I’ve talked about the free Power Toys that you can download from Microsoft here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp
Tweak UI lets you make changes to the XP user interface and the Image Resizer lets you change the size of images just by right-clicking in Windows Explorer. One more Power Toy is worth mentioning: the Slide Show Wizard. With this free utility, you can create Internet slide shows from your images.
To make a slide show, you run the wizard, which lets you choose the images on your hard disk you want to include. Note that you really need to make sure that the images are Web friendly. In other words, they should be in either JPG or GIF format and be sized down as small as possible for online viewing. Larger images take longer to download and your site visitors will welcome small files and short download times.
The easiest thing to do is put all your Web-friendly images in one folder. Then when you run through the wizard, you can select the entire folder of images to add to your slide show with just one click. After you’ve added the images, you can click and drag the images to change the order in which they appear in the show.
Once you have your images loaded and sorted, you select a few options and tell the Slide Show Wizard where you want to put the files. When you click the Next button, the program generates the required HTML files for you in the folder you specified. It also has a preview button you can click to view the show and see how it turned out. If you decide you like it, you can upload the files to your Web site.