2011 Year in Review

Here's my annual family slideshow. I started working on it back in September and if I added up all the time I spent working on putting it together it would amount to days…maybe even a week or two. All I know is that it was TONS of work, but well worth it in the end because I think it turned out really well. This is the third year that I've put together an end of the year "Year in Review," but the first year that I've used ProShow Producer (the new slideshow software that I bought last summer). It was expensive – about $350 with the extras that I bought to go with it, but worth it because I really love the effects available in this program.

The slideshow ended up being 27 minutes long and I could've easily made it longer, but I tried to keep it under 30 minutes. I come from a family of seven, and five my sisters are married with relatively large families of their own, so I had lots of material to work with. I'm not sure how many photos ended up making the cut into the slideshow, but there were a lot; I'm guessing between 600 and 800. I had tons of pictures to work with and there's no way I could include even half of them since I wanted to keep my slideshow under 30 minutes. The weeding out process was harder than you might think because I wanted to include ALL of the pictures since each one means so much to me!

I decided to upload my slideshow to YouTube because it's an easy way to share it with family and friends so that I wouldn't have to go to the hassle of burning the slideshow to a DVD and mailing it out. I split the slideshow into two parts to make uploading easier, and then I put each part on YouTube. (It took more than three hours to upload the entire thing!) Take a look if you like, and if you do, let me know what you think!

I hope that one day my nieces and nephews will look back on these slideshows with fondness and may even enjoy watching them with their own children.