Paul Thurrott reports that Microsoft began offering WIndows XP users a free download of Photo Story today:
On Wednesday, Microsoft will ship Photo Story 3 for Windows, the latest version of its amazing digital photo slideshow utility. However, this version of Photo Story differs from previous versions in many ways, adding a wide range of new functionality. Best of all, it will be made available free to all users of Windows XP.
Originally scheduled to be integrated with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, Photo Story 3 builds on the successes of Plus! Photo Story and Plus! Photo Story 2, which were included in successive versions of Plus! Digital Media Edition, a digital media-oriented add-on pack for Windows XP that sold millions of copies over two years. Like previous versions, Photo Story 3 uses a simple wizard-like interface to help consumers turn still photos into immersive animated videos called photo stories, which feature professional panning and zooming animations similar to those popularized by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. You can also optionally add narration, background music, and titles to your photo stories.
Photo Story 3 builds on this functionality in a number of ways. From within the Photo Story interface, you can now edit and rotate photos, add several effects, remove black borders from vertically-oriented photos, and add captions to individual photos if you'd like. And in addition to adding music to your photo stories, you can also automatically generate a soundtrack based on a selection of genre types, styles, bands, moods, tempo, and intensity. Photo Story 3 then customizes that music to match the length of the photo story to which it is applied. Finally, Photo Story 3 also makes it easier to share your creations with friends and family, offering a variety of templates that are compatible with PCs, Portable Media Centers, Pocket PCs, and smartphones, or that can be transmitted easily via email or the Web.
Thurrott's review is here.
Download from Microsoft
here (requires XP Validation - have your XP Product Key handy).
Channel 9 has an interview with the product
team including a demo of the application.
1. Paul mentions in his article that if you have the previous version of Photo Story 2, that you'll lose some features. I think he's just comparing the two and may not mean this as losing features in an "upgrade" process.
>>Quote: Also, because Photo Story 3 was originally intended to be included only with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, Microsoft has stripped away the ability to burn VCDs directly from the Photo Story interface. That's because you can burn DVDs and VCDs directly from within Media Center. But for other users of XP, sorry, but you're out of luck. You'll need to find your own disc-burning solution.
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But, one thing that is nice is during the install, it installed the newer version separatly from the PS 2 version. It did not "upgrade" Photo Story 2. So "both" now live on my PC.
Hope this helps,
Steve Banks
Posted at 6:20AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Steve Banks