Desktop: What Grandma 'gets'

This may be a digital world, but there are still plenty of analog people walking around. And those people really, really want to see the pictures you took of your kids' first-grade graduation ceremony.

z 88 (photo credit: )
z 88
(photo credit: )
This may be a digital world, but there are still plenty of analog people walking around. And those people really, really want to see the pictures you took of your kids' first-grade graduation ceremony. "So? Just send them some pictures?" A simple and legitimate question, but of course the answer is anything but simple in this digital image age. Pictures today are taken on digital cameras (do they even make the other kind anymore?). You could, if you wanted to, print the images out on photo paper (not cheap), but it seems kind of a waste - of both time and money. Why not just stick the pictures on a CD or, even better, in an e-mail, and send them out to Grandma, who really, really wants to see the kids getting their mini-diplomas? You know why: because Grandma doesn't "get" e-mail, CDs, Web sites or any of the other electronic image transmission methods you can use to send her photos. And don't try to tell her that all she needs is a Jpeg reader to check out the pictures - her heart isn't strong enough to handle something like that! Grandma - as well as many others - "gets" pictures in an envelope. Luckily, she can also follow a simple set of instructions, like "click on this to see all the pictures." If you could get her to go as far as clicking on something, you could let her see the photos without having to spend money and effort on printing out and mailing them. It's worth a try, isn't it? But of course, if you want to minimize the work for Grandma, or any other digitally-challenged significant other, you have to put in a lot of preparatory work getting things to work just so - usually. In our case, however, you're going to download the free, easy-to-use XnView (http://xnview.com/), which lets you put together a slide show of all your photos into a one-click executable (.exe) file or Web page, making it easy to send a whole bunch of pictures to Grandma - or anyone else, for that matter - with a minimum of fuss. And with XnView, you won't have to fuss. Just select the photos, choose the appropriate function (create slideshow, executable, or Web page), add some music, and you're done. The Web page - basic, but nice enough - gets generated automatically, with absolutely no HTML or other user-unfriendly acronyms involved, and you can post it on a Web site or just e-mail the whole folder. And the executable, of course, comes out as a single file, with all the photos embedded inside. Before creating your show, XnView allows you to edit the photo's size, color balance, brightness, redeye, etc. And XnView has many other features as well - such as the ability to convert between 50 different digital formats and capture and manage pictures from your camera. Forget about Grandma - you need XnView. http://www.newzgeek.com