Photo Story is a free Microsoft program to take up as many as 300 photos and make a Windows video movie from them.

You can add titles to your photos, apply zooming and panning and choose from a set of sixty transitions to add more flavour to your movie. Once you've got your photos in order, you can add music and finally render your piece of creativity as a Windows movie video so that others can watch it in Windows Media Player. Or you can upload it to Soapbox on MSN video so family and friends can view it whenever it suits them.

There's a Photo Story homepage and you can download the program from a link on this page.

You can use photos you've taken with your digital camera or you can scan photo prints. If you have negatives that have been stored away for years because you've lost the photos, take advantage of a new service offered at Rushworth Community House to get these negatives scanned and turned into digital photos.

When scanning your photos, turn up the resolution so the scanned photo is large enough to clearly display on a large screen through a data projector. Don't attempt to crop a small section of a photo - the larger the photo, the better the viewing experience.

Photo Story has two files associated with it: your project file and the finished movie file. The project file is the one where your photos are laid out in the order you want them to appear and includes your titles, transitions and zooming and panning settings, and accompanying music and narration if you want.  This is the most important file and the one you want to continually save as you make changes. You can render the movie at any time and it's basically the final step but as long as you've got your project file, you can always return to it, make some edits and render the movie again.

A little trick for titles is to use the same photo twice, the first photo being edited in Photo Story to create a washout effect so the title stands out against the background. There are plenty of options for the placement of the title and you've got different fonts and colours on hand.

Under Customise Motion you're able to manually set the way in which Photo Story pans in and out of your photos. For example, you can start the pan motion with the complete photo in view and then zoom into a particular feature in the photo (e.g., a person's face or a particular landmark). If you add narration (you get a maximum of four minutes per photo), as you narrate you can move the mouse to indicate to Photo Story how you want the panning and zooming to show in the movie.

There are about sixty transitions to choose from to add that special bit of flair to your movie, just like they do on TV. However, don't go overboard otherwise you're audience will be transitioned out.

Once you've got your photos in order, you can add background music to give atmosphere to your movie. Be careful, though, that you don't use copyright content, especially if you're uploading your finished movie to Soapbox. Soapbox and other online video providers such as YouTube now have filters to weed out copyright content. However Photo Story has a built-in music generator and you won't have any problems with copyright by using it.

Photo Story is a great tool to create a work of art from all those photos that might otherwise just sit on your hard disk for ages. Once you've got your movie and have uploaded it to Soapbox, you can embed it on your Live Space and we can all enjoy your photos in an entertaining way.

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