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I apologise for the poor quality of the screenshots. I can't find an English version of Photo Story 3 anymore, so all the screenshots are from a terrible YouTube video I made years ago.

Photo Story 3 was a free program Microsoft made for Windows XP in 2004. I don't know what previous two Photo Story installments are like, I've only used this one. PS3 still works on Windows 10, so you can still use it today! Nobody really cares about this program today, and it's useless nowadays, but it's a nice piece of obscure Windows XP history.

I first used this software in primary school. They told us we were going to use the computers to make a virtual tour of our school. In my mind I thought were were going to make something like a 3D open world game. But then I found out were were just going to make a slide show of images of the school. We all had the same images to work from, so every student's tour looked the same. To make these slide shows, we used Photo Story.



Basically, Photo Story is just a slide show maker. You can add fancy effects and music. The best feature (and the one that I spent most of my time playing with) was the music generator. I still think it's really cool! It lets you pick a style and a mood, and it'll generate background music for your slide show. There are a lot of different combinations to pick from. The slide show could be exported as a video file for different devices. I don't think it supported widescreen.



Photo Story was out at the same time as Movie Maker, which can make the same kinds of slide shows but much better. If you already had Movie Maker installed, there's not really much point in installing Photo Story. The only thing PS does better is that it makes it incredibly easy to pump out a quick slide show.



Microsoft later made another, but unrelated mobile app called "Photo Story" for Windows Phone. It has the same idea as the original program for Windows XP. I used to be a Windows Phone user myself, but I'd never heard of this app before. A few years ago, it was incredibly easy to download Photo Story 3 from Microsoft's website, but now the only versions available are in Norwegian or Chinese. It is probably still available in other languages through the Internet Archive.

"Fun" Fact: There is Photo Story product placement in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. I don't have the game on my new computer so I can't provide a screenshot, but one of the photo areas you can add to your park has PS advertised on it. I think it may have been for Photo Story 2, but I can't really remember.

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