By Lois M. Collins
Deseret News staff writer

      You've moved to the digital photography stage, but you don't have any more idea what to do with all your photos, once you've looked at them, than you did when you stored your film-based shots in shoe boxes.
      3-D Album by Micro Research Institute has my vote, in part because it's so simple to use I never cracked the manual.
      The $40, two-CD program (one is a tutorial, the other the actual program) lets you take those digital images stored on your computer and turn them into an anything-but-boring slide show, complete with music. From there, you can make them into screen savers, put them on your Web page, e-mail them to friends or burn the whole thing onto a CD.
      The special effects are anything but dull. It gets its name from the fact that you can present your albums in a host of three-dimensional effects, from rising hot air balloons to whirling apples, movie dissolves, a Rubik's-style cube and more.
      You can pick from more than 60 colorful and unique presentations, including a spinning wood-paneled art gallery or one where the photos pop open like the doors on an elevator.
      When you send it to friends, either as a CD or e-mail, they don't need to program to play it, a definite bonus. And it compresses like crazy.
      You can even make your photos windblown and see-through. What a deal.
      When you start the program, it seems too rudimentary to bother with. Don't be fooled. This is a great program that produces a really entertaining result. And it doesn't hurt that it's all point-and-click, so simple that computer-comfortable children could organize their own photos into albums. Forget compiling photo albums for the kids. They can do it themselves.
      It's as simple as dragging and dropping photos to put them in sequence, then choosing one of 23 presentation styles on the software. There are 20 different designs available online as well, in a collection that's continually expanding at http://www.3d-album.com/.
      Your photos will float in water, provide the sails on sailboats or be embedded in a kaleidoscope, for example.
      The user decides on animation speed, photo size, background colors, textures and other features. You can put in captions or pre-recorded voice narrations and add music.
      The 3D-Album supports 10 languages, including Japanese, Korean, French, German, Chinese, Italian and Spanish.