The proliferation of cheap digital cameras and DVD burners means that consumers, with the help of programs like Ulead PictureShow, can now create their own professional-looking slideshows on DVD at little cost.

PictureShow has a very simple interface, consisting of three main tabs: Organize, Theme and Burn. Organize lets you browse for photos and arrange them, Theme enables you to add preset menus, music, effects and text, while Burn lets you copy the results to VCD or DVD.

The Organize tab is quite simple to use and can have photos ready fairly quickly. Under the Theme tab, the effects such as wipes and dissolves are quite professional, but are not configurable picture by picture. Also the time to display each picture is set at the beginning, so it isn't possible to edit the speed of the cuts to follow the music, for example.

Adding text to photos is a little confusing as there are two possible ways to do it. Users can inadvertently have two sets of titles at once and both text fields aren't editable from the same window.

The product appears to offer a lot of power but the Options icons on each panel offer only rudimentary changes. And creating slideshows is a slow process - particularly if creating for a DVD. The manufacturer suggests a minimum P3 933 and 256MB RAM but the program chugged even on an Athlon 64 3000+ with a gigabyte of RAM! Switching between the Organize and Theme tabs can take 30 seconds at a time for the screen to redraw.
Under Burn, the niggles continue: the program will correctly identify your media type, but will still try to burn to DVD even if you put a CD in. A small dropdown menu at the bottom of the screen lets you choose VCD or DVD, but the software should be intelligent enough to do this for you.

The results, once burnt onto a DVD, are quite pleasing however. In the end, PictureShow is a program capable of a goodlooking product for those who are willing to persevere with it.