One of the easiest ways to display your photos or presentations is by slideshow but unfortunately, not everyone has Powerpoint.

That's why it's sometimes a good idea to convert them to a universal format that everyone can read - such as AVI. AVI Slide Show is an easy-to-use tool to convert digital photos to video and create stunning slide shows with transition effects. The main features include the ability to convert digital photos to AVI files, dozens of transition effects (over 170 in fact so your presentations will never look dull at least) and support of a huge range of formats, namely JPEG (JPG), BMP, GIF, TIF, PCX, PNG, WMF, EMF, TGA, DCX, RAW (CRW, NEF ...) and PSD. The program uses an open compression system for video and the developers claim that the outputted AVI file is at a higher resolution than with a DVD.

While it's hard to confirm or deny this, the quality is remarkably sharp and clear. In addition to all this, the program provides real-time slide show previews so you can see your slideshow before you spend time outputting it to AVI and you can choose to show or hide thumbnails.

With so many transition options and codecs to choose from, and considering this is considerably cheaper than similar programs, AVI Slide Show is an excellent package although the conversions to AVI do move rather slowly.