Basically you need to add these effects to your photos to make it alive: select animated transitions between images, insert colorful text to display on slides, and add lovely background music or your voice narration to a slideshow.

For those who have little knowledge on professional video editing software like Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas, most of them will try to use Windows Movie Maker to create a photo slideshow. Windows Movie Maker can be used to create a slideshow of photos with the music background and transition effects, and save in WMV video format, which can then be burned into a DVD using Windows DVD Maker included in some versions of Windows.

However, to make a great photo slideshow in Windows Movie Maker is not an easy job. You need to adjust every one picture, music, text, transition and timing to combine them as an entity. That usually takes hours of work. While a good photo slideshow maker bring your still photos to life in just a few minutes.

Why not make a photo slideshow using PowerPoint 2010? I think most of you should be very familiar with PowerPoint and make a PowerPoint slideshow should be a piece of cake for you! You know, you can add all your favorite photos into PowerPoint with one click! Click Insert > Photo Album, in the pop up window, choose insert picture from File/Disk, select all the pictures and click Create. All the photos will be inserted and one photo on one slide. Add transitions and animations to make these photos alive. Next we need to add background music, text and rehearse the timings.

An emotional background song will greatly enhance the atmosphere of the photo slideshow. Set the song play across the entire slide as background music. In the Animation Pane, right click on the song and enter the Effect Options dialog box, in the Effect tab, set the song Start playing from beginning and Stop playing after the last slide.

To make the text dim with the song, you can click Animations tab of the ribbon, choose Brush Color from the Emphasis group. In the Animation Pane, set it Start with Previous and select proper duration timing.

Finally, rehearse timings of your photo slideshow. Click Slide Show tab of the ribbon and choose Rehearse Timings. Be patient and set a certain amount of time for each slide to transit to the next.

The PowerPoint formats are not convenient for viewing on portable devices or sharing with other on YouTube, etc. So you can use Moyea PPT to Video Converter to convert PowerPoint to various video formats like MP4, FLV, AVI, WMV, etc. while keeping all the effects. PowerPoint 2010 also enables you to save PowerPoint as WMV video directly.