Gentle HP3000 list server subscribers,

Please pardon this off topic post, but I know some of you have digital
cameras and computers with CD-R/RW burners.  This message will be for you.
 All others can simply delete this message.

Since I have started taking pictures digitally, I take a huge number at
special occasions.  Recently, we were at a family reunion and I took 155
pictures over 3 days, that's after dumping the really bad ones.  In
September, by two youngest daughters celebrate their birthdays.  Between
the two parties, I took 188 pictures.  I wanted to send a copy of these
pictures to my parents.  Printing them would take a long time and would be
wasteful.  So I looked at sending a CD-R.

My parents are getting on in age (almost 80) and computers are very
daunting to them.  However, we have just purchased an HP laptop for my Dad
so he had a very recent system with the latest consumer Windows operating
system.  Nevertheless, transferring pictures on a CD-R and then sending
them the disk would still require them to mount the disk and start some
type of program and click on each image to view it.  For 340+ pictures,
that's a fair amount of work.  What to do, what to do?

A search of the Internet unearthed a program called Slideshow.  It is
available, free of charge here: http://hjem.get2net.dk/lpj/

It is a very neat and simple program.  Simply start it and point to the
directory containing the pictures one wants to view and the program cycles
through the pictures, just like a slide projector.  If you start it in a
directory that has pictures in it, it doesn't even ask what to open, it
show those pictures and any subdirectories.

I went one step further and burned 2 CD-Rs, one for each occasion.  In the
root of the CD-R, I placed the slideshow program, its two DLLs and the .ini
file, all the pictures to view and a AUTORUN.INF file containing the
following lines:

[autorun]
open=slideshow.exe sortname
icon = slideshow.exe

When the CD-R is inserted in the drive, the program comes up automagically
and the show starts.

Viewing the pictures on a 14 inch LCD is very nice, the program maximizes
the viewing area and the pictures are huge, much bigger than a 4X6!  Great
for old eyes.  I sent the full resolution pictures, 2048X1536X24.  Each
file is about 1.2 MB.  The results are great.  If they want to get a
picture printed, they can take the disk to a service that will do that for
them.

It couldn't get any simpler.  But it was not quite simple enough.  One has
to know how to open the CD-ROM drive on the computer.  One has to know
where the CD-ROM is.  Once we got through that, the cries of joy over the
phone were reward enough.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 288-7438
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com

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