Hello

My family sees me as "the computer guy" and I've been made a request that, even though it annoys me, is very easy while using MS-Windows, but looks impossible to me while using Linux

That is : take a pack of various family photographs provided by various family members, and make them into a video format movie that could be shared privately on youtube.

The pictures have various compressions, sizes and dimention ratios.
There wouldn't be special transition effects (well, a little blur or something like that to make it smooth would be a minimum, that's all), no special audio track to add...

Do you know any linuxian software able to make it simply, by chance ? I don't even know what good keywords would allow to find a reply, so this is no surprise my google or yahoo searches failed so far

Thank you very much if you can help me, I will be grateful

Open Office has a program called "Presentations". I believe this will down size all the photos to fit the slides automatically. I am not sure about the photos that are smaller than the page. Of course the program "Gimp" will resize individual photos. I do not know of a program that will make all selected photos the same size at once if that is what you mean.

Thanks Larry

If it were as simple as that, gwenview and ShowImg would do it already.
The biggest problem is : how to transform individual .jpg files into a single playable .avi (or .mpeg, or .mov, I don't care at that point) video file...

If you want something which is all GUI driven, you can do this with kdenlive which is to my mind Linux's most usable video editing software.

You would do it like this:

• Open kdenlive
• Go to settings -> configure kdenlive...
• In the Misc section, set the number of seconds you want each image to show for in the setting labelled "Default color/image clip duration". I used 3 seconds for my test, which is displayed as "00:00:03:00"
• In the thumbnail list pane (with headings: Thumbnail, Filename, Description), right click and select "Add Clips".
• Use the file selector to add the images you want to use.
• Drag the images from the thumb list to the video timeline at the bottom of the window
• You can add audio too if you like
• Select: File -> Export Timeline
• Choose the quality and format of your movie file, and the filename.
• That's it

what about dvd-slideshow, have you checked into that?

I'll second the recommendation for dvd-slideshow. Also, if you want a gui front end for this you can use qdvdauthor. dvd-slideshow is a really slick tool for creating a slidshow from pictures, and allows plenty of effects as well as the inclusion of music. I've used this to create family slideshows and found it easier to use than any windows software I tried this with. Once you get the output from dvdslideshow all you would need to do is convert it to the you tube format. I don't know anything about you tube so I don't have any suggestions there.

Here is a link to the dvd slideshow documentation that you might find helpful. You would probably stop after step 2 once you have the vob file, and then work on transforming that to whatever the youtube format is. As you can see, with just two entries from the command line, you will have your fully working slideshow mpeg. The hardest part is picking and sorting your photos, and selecting the music you want.

One more thing about dvd-slideshow, it comes with dvd-menu, which is a very easy to use menu creator. This is helpful if you have several lots of family pics, say some of a birthday party and some of a reunion, you can have a menu with labeled buttons "Birthday Party" and "Family Reunion". It is way easier ( for me, at least ) than using dvdauthor for menus.