How many photos can I put on a DVD

[hiker48]

I have resized my photos to 1000X750 like the book says to do for a slide show DVD to play on the TV. How many photos can I fit on a DVD? When I do the math, it sounds like I could put about 4000, but the slide show editor says not to put more than 500 or it will be too slow. Do I really need to keep it down to 500?

I want to make a slide show of a trip to Alaska that I have narrowed down to 3700 and would rather not have them on 7 or 8 different DVDs if I can help it.

Thanks for any input you might have.

[rfjg]

Number of photos will depend on how long you want each one to appear on the screen. If the average time per photo is 10 seconds, then 500 photos would work out to an 83 min slideshow. Might be a little long for single sided DVD. For best quality, 60mins on a single sided DVD would be the max I'd want to go.

[Chuck Engels]

Like RF says, it is the total time of the video that will fit on a DVD or not, the number of photos do not really matter.
I have created slideshows for people of up to 2.5 hours standard definition on a single DVD without too much quality loss, but I do not recommend that. Anything over an hour is going to bore people to death, actually about 20 minutes is best.

You need to keep the photos on screen for at least 6 seconds for people to be able to process them, longer if you want them to actually see the images and even longer if you want to do any pan and zoom. My usual display time for images is at least 8 seconds, if the audience will be older people then I will use 12 seconds or more.

3700 photos times 6 seconds is equal to 370 minutes or almost 31 hours, you can't fit that on a DVD slideshow movie.
If the photos are 1mb each you can barely fit the images on a DVD as just photo files/data as that would be about 3.7 GB of data alone.

100 photos is plenty for any slideshow, just my opinion

Most DVD players will do a slideshow automatically if you put a data disc in the player that has photos on the disc.
The DVD player will display the photos for a length of time and then transition to the next, no need to create a slideshow with software if that is all you want to do. Most DVD players have menu options to set the length of time each photo is displayed among other options.

[Dave McElderry]

Chuck said:

Most DVD players will do a slideshow automatically if you put a data disc in the player that has photos on the disc.
The DVD player will display the photos for a length of time and then transition to the next, no need to create a slideshow with software if that is all you want to do. Most DVD players have menu options to set the length of time each photo is displayed among other options.

Ditto this and everything else that Chuck wrote. If you're producing something to entertain and give people an opportunity to get a taste of your trip it needs to be kept to a relatively short length. By the time it gets to 45 minutes (probably well before) they'll be glassy-eyed and looking for an escape route. But if you want to use DVDs as data storage to archive your photos Chuck's suggestion will be a much more efficient way to do it. If these mean as much to you as I suspect they do, don't make the DVDs your only archive. Save in several places, also on hard disk for example, including at least one location that's physically separate in case of fire. As the years go by and technology changes it may be necessary to transfer these files to new mediums so that you don't wake up one morning realizing that you no longer have any way to access those files. Maybe you already knew this, but it's worth mentioning.

[rfjg]

3700 photos times 6 seconds is equal to 370 minutes or almost 31 hours

Little correction here, this works out to 6 hours and 10 mins, still to long.

[Chuck Engels]

, thanks for the correction RF
That's what you get when you divide by 12 instead of 60

But yes, still way too long
Anyone interested in watching a 6 hour slideshow?

[momoffduty]

Anyone interested in watching a 6 hour slideshow?

No

My growing up graduation slideshows & wedding slideshows usually run between 18 min & 23 min using around 125 to 175 photos. The longest one I did for someone was around 28 minutes and over 200 photos. These all had 4 to 6 chapters.

If you want to make a long slideshow I would suggest plenty of chapters so you can select which ones to watch.

Chuck, I had no idea some DVD players will play a data DVD and will add a transition. Thanks for the tip.

[hiker48]

Thank you for all of the input. I guess what I will do is make my slide show for an audience about an hour long. I can appease them with snacks. I will absolutely make several copies of each original. I already have them on my hard drive, my external drive, and DVDs. What I want in the end is a slideshow with everything on it that my husband and I can pull out and watch on the TV when we feel like renewing our trip. I guess I had better buy some more DVDs!