Now today in a digital world, many digital photographers always face to tons of digital photos in the laptop and confuse how to deposit and share in a better way. As a shutterbug, I prefer to burn photos to DVD for storage and share.

DVDs are a great way to backup photos from computer for storage and share. With inexpensive prices, a standard single layer DVD can store 4.7GB of data while a dual layer one has a capacity of 8.5GB and both easily to be burned copies by common DVD writer for share. For larger capacity, Blu-ray disc (25 GB single layer, 50 GB dual layer, 100GB 4 layer, 200GB 8 layer) may be a better choice. But problems of these high-tech products are not only the costliness of BD discs, reader, writer and player but also the non-popular of use and result in the disaster of share. So, I still use the common DVDs.

In order to start putting photos on DVDs, a DVD writer is needed. The speed of the writer all depends on what type of DVD drive you have. 1X DVD write speed indicates that the DVD writer can burn your data roughly the same speed that a DVD player can read a DVD. So if your DVD writer writes at 16X that's 16 times faster.

You don’t need to burn a specially formatted disc but just a regular data DVD full of digital photos if you own a DVD player with built-in slide-show features for viewing JPEG images. Lots of new type DVD players have the features such as Sony DVP-NS57P, Pioneer DV-490V-S, LG DN788, Panasonic DVD-S53S/K, Philips DVP5982 and etc. Different types of players with different play menu, photo quantity limitation and so on. So, DVDs display in this style via my Sony player but that on my friend’s Panasonic.

If your DVD player doesn’t have such features, creating DVD photo slide shows via apps will be help and it is a much more stunning and professional way for storage and share. Bellows are kinds of apps.

1. Free apps that can create photo slideshows.

Google’s Picasa, is a free software download from Google. Picasa can make photo slideshows with simple clicks and copy files to DVD media using both the "Backup" and "Gift CD" features, but DVDs create by Picasa can not be played on all types of DVD players.

Windows Movie Maker 2, included free in XP and Vista, helps to create AVI or WMA slideshows. Although it doesn’t natively burn DVDs playable by many DVD players, Windows Movie Maker has many powerful features (say exquisite effects) to magnetize users and adding DVD writing capabilities to Windows Movie Maker with inexpensive applications will figure it out.

2. Commercial apps wholly make for creating DVD slide shows.

Nero PhotoShow Deluxe 5 ($39.99) is famous and powerful software which includes a massive amount of slide-show-authoring options for photo DVDs. Nero has a 15-day trial for PhotoShow Deluxe, while the free PhotoDVD trial lets you create slide shows with up to 100 images. As a sub-product from Nero, it has highly stability on its writing capability.

DVD Slideshow Builder 4 ($39.95), another professional and popular app that can create DVD photo slideshows with photos, video clips and music in high-resolution HD DVD video format and burn directly. It provides a free trial version with Watermark on output, 30-day trial limitation. What it attract me is its plenty 2D/3D transitions and Ken-Burns effects.

Although photo online sharing is a hot trend, such as Flick.com, DVDs displayed via TV set and player can not be instead by other things. It is in a popular style for years.

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