Advice needed: software to make a slide show

[iggers]

I have been asked to create a slide show, to be run on a laptop. The images will all be of my mother-inlaw, who passed away in January at the age of 90. There will be a "memorial weekend" aty the end of July at the family cottage where she spent every summer of her life. The grandson who has been organizing the weekend gathering initially suggested a projector and screen, but I told him that I prefer to have the slide show just run on a laptop screen.

So: I am looking for suggestions, as to free software that will make it easy to create a slide show. I would like to be able to add music as well. I don't have a lot of time. I have some images on my computer, and a brother-in-law will be providing many more images on a disk.

[martolod]

Picasa

free and very easy to use.
fairly intuitive and very easy learning curve.

[Kin Lau]

Many DVD players have a slideshow mode that just shuffles thru all the pics on the disk. About as easy as it gets.

Irfanview also has a slideshow mode, just dump all the pics into a directory, and it'll just play them all, or save the list to a file and then edit that and load it back in.

My wife has been using the Slideshow editor that comes with PS Elements 5.0, it's a lot fancier and also runs slower.

[Philip]

Dan, I'd second Martolod's suggestion of Picasa.  I've used it for four years and it really is very simple. And totally free (from Google).

It has the advantage of very simple, and reversible, tweaking by the user (adjusting shadow and brightness, for example, which may be useful with old pictures).

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[martolod]

Dan, I'd second Martolod's suggestion of Picasa.  I've used it for four years and it really is very simple. And totally free (from Google).

It has the advantage of very simple, and reversible, tweaking by the user (adjusting shadow and brightness, for example, which may be useful with old pictures).

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i forgot about the that feature...
it does not alter the source file unless you specifically ask it too, but it will store/display the improved file.and it will read a lot of RAW formats ( it quite happily reads and converts the pentax RAW format that i use)

[KirkT]

In my opinion, Soundslides wins hands down.  You can download a free version which works quite well.  It saves it's files as HTML but can be run on your computer.  Give it a look-see.