iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

DVD Slideshows

The DVD may be the world's best delivery mechanism for digital photos. Your friends sit there on the couch. They click the remote control to walk through your photos (or, if you choose, they let the slideshow advance automatically). Instead of passing around a tiny pile of fragile 4 x 6 prints, your audience gets to watch the photos at TV-screen size, looking sensational—accompanied by a musical soundtrack of your choice.

In iDVD '09, in fact, you can incorporate movies into your slideshows. Sure, this feature may seem to violate the very definition of a slideshow, but whatever—the ability to mix stills and videos adds a lot to the visual record of your life.

If you've installed movies into an iDVD menu screen, installing photos will seem like a piece of cake. Once again, you can do so using several different methods, each with its own advantages:

• iPhoto albums. Click Media, then click Photos. iDVD presents your entire iPhoto picture collection, complete with the albums you've used to organize them.

  The great thing about this system is that iPhoto albums contain well-defined image progressions. That is, you presumably dragged the photos into an emotionally satisfying sequence. That's exactly how iDVD presents the pictures—as they appear in the album, from the first image to the last.

• Folder drag-and-drop. If the pictures you want to add aren't in iPhoto, you can also drag a folder full of them right off the desktop (or from a Finder folder) and onto an iDVD menu screen. ...