There are plenty of photo managers that enable you to collate your photos, sort them within categories, pick and select favourite images, rate them and then view them in a particular order. There are also a number of photo enhancement tools that will enable you to touch up your images, add special effects and spend time enhancing them for printing on your new inkjet printer.

Surprisingly, there are fewer tools designed for you to maximise how you presented your photos to other users, particularly your friends and family, who wanted to see the finished article, as quickly as possible. You want to present these photos to family in a slideshow, either on disc or on the web.

Microsoft Photo Story 3 is a tool that is designed to take existing photos or images and then enable you to add a title, background music, narration and then export them to a format that you can easily email to another user, show from your desktop or allow playback from a portable device.

Note that the export options are rather limited to Microsoft Media Player supported devices – therefore the recipient will require Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 or higher installed.