I created an iPhoto slideshow of my students with about 250 photos and 15 minutes of music. What would be the best way to share it with the students' parents?

Burn it to a DVD:

Export the slideshow from iPhoto, that makes a movie of it.

Do you want to use this DVD in a domestic DVD player? If so, then the disk will have to be 'authored' to make it the correct form for that. If you have iDVD then that's the app you use. However, iDVD is no longer developed or distributed by Apple. You may be able to get it on an old iLIfe install disk.

Other options:

Burn: http://macupdate.com/app/mac/21992/burn

Toast: http://macupdate.com/app/mac/6351/toast-titanium

But there are lots of others too. Search on the App Store or MacUpdate

Other than that your options include:

Upload it to a sharing site like YouTube or Vimeo and email a link - these will allow the recipient to view the material online.

Or

Upload it to sharing services like Dropbox or YouSendIt and email a link. This will require that they download the material to their machines to view.

Regards

TD

Another method would be to export the slideshow as a QT movie file and upload that file to YouTube. You can get your own account. You can then give the URL to the movie to the parents of your students.

If you decide to go the video DVD route the following may help:

Export the slideshow out of iPhoto as a QT movie file via the Export button in the lower toolbar. For iPhoto 9.4.3 and earlier select Size = Medium. For iPhoto 9.5 and later selct 480p.

Open iDVD, select a theme and drag the exported QT movie file into the open iDVD window being careful to avoid any drop zones.

Follow this workflow to help assure the best quality video DVD:

Once you have the project as you want it save it as a disk image via the File ➙ Save as Disk Image menu option. This will separate the encoding process from the burn process.

To check the encoding mount the disk image, launch DVD Player and play it. If it plays OK with DVD Player the encoding is good.

Then burn to disk with Disk Utility or Toast at the slowest speed available (2x-4x) to assure the best burn quality. Always use top quality media: Verbatim, Maxell or Taiyo Yuden DVD-R are the most recommended in these forums.

If iDVD was not preinstalled on your Mac you'll have to obtain it by purchasing a copy of the iLife 09 disk from a 3rd party retailer like Amazon.com: ilife 09: Software or eBay.com. Why, because iDVD (and iWeb) was discontinued by Apple over a year ago.

Why iLife 09 instead of 11?

If you have to purchase an iLife disc in order to obtain the iDVD application remember that the iLife 11 disc only provides themes from iDVD 5-7. The Software Update no longer installs the earlier themes when starting from the iLIfe 11 disk nor do any of the iDVD 7 updaters available from the Apple Downloads website contain them.

Currently the only sure fire way to get all themes is to start with the iLife 09 disc:

This shows the iDVD contents in the iLife 09 disc via Pacifist:

You then can upgrade from iDVD 7.0.3 first to iDVD 7.0. and then to iDVD 7.1.2 to iDVD 7.1.2 via this updater: iDVD 7.1.2