[ale] NewbieQ on OO/Impress for photo slide shows

[John Mills]

ALErs -

With no prior experience I'm using OpenOffice 'Impress' to package about 
100 digital photos as a slide show. Since the files are good quality 
photos, the resulting presentation is getting _BBEEEGGGG_ (c.250MBy). The 
problem: it's become glacially slow to work on!

What is a good image size/resolution for JPEG slides to be viewed on 
computer display - say 1680x1050 (WSXGA) or smaller? Would the answer be 
very different for a typical digital projector (bearing in mind the 
viewing distance would be considerably larger and having no idea of the 
usual projector's resolution)?

Is there some automatic way to have the slides imported (or alternatively 
saved) in a reduced format, or should I use some other tool like GIMP or 
ImageMagick to resize them? (They aren't all the same size due to some 
cropping and some images coming from different cameras.)

If most users have Ms 'PoserPoint' to view the slides, should I expect 
major problems with a presentation exported from OpenOffice as '*.ppt'?

I was targeting CD and planning to include the original photo files in a 
separate directory. (There would be space.) DVD would be OK if there were 
advantages to the medium or some especially handy packaging tool 
available.

General suggestions welcomed as well.

TIA.
  - Mills