The wife and I are planning her parents 50th anniversary party.  We have 50 years or more worth of photo albums and want to scan a bunch of them and project a slideshow at the party.  I wonder if anyone can suggest what might be the best most user friendly software to do such a thing.  I would like the ability to add music and make a real nice show that I can easily burn onto a CD and present with a laptop and a projector.

Any chance you are a photographer who has some post-processing software available already?

Not sure if you want to buy something or if you are looking for something free.  I work in video production and we use ProShow Producer fairly often.  I think that ProShow Gold would probably do more than you would really need, and it is less expensive.  They have free trials, but I am not sure if the rendered videos are watermarked or not.  They have a great function to import all your photos, import your music and have the software fit all the pics to the music.  As long as you are close in the number of photos to fit the length of the music, so you do not end up with your photos being on for a really long time, or a very short amount of time.  You can preview it, and if you do not like it ask it to redo the show.  Or if you see your pics are moving way to fast you can go back and either pull pics out or add more music.  Then you can go back and tweak little things if you do not like certain individual effects.

Phil

Also wanted to mention.  Do not burn the video to CD or DVD to play on a laptop.  Just render out a file that will play like a .AVI, .MOV, or h.264 (this is my go to file).  Computers do a marginal job of playing DVD's, and showing a video to a bunch of people is not when you want things to act up.  Plus if you just render a file you can keep it in HD.

Phil

JIP, the best user-friendly and free software you can use is probably Windows Movie Maker.  You can plop your images and/or videos in the timeline, add music, and then you can go through one-by-one and adjust transitions or have it done automatically.  It's available for all windows versions, but some may have to download it.  

No need to get overly complicated, and the KISS principle is applied here.

Note:  When picking out music, make sure you convert any MP3s to WMV or WAV.  This will save you a ton of time because Windows Movie Maker doesn't like MP3s and screws the timing.

If you want to have a heavier hand in the process I agree with skdvr. It's hard to beat ProShow Gold. If you want the software to do most of the heavy lifting I had the wife use Muvee Reveal X for her parents' 50th earlier this year.

Another vote for the ProShow products.  For a "simple" slideshow the Gold would be great.  I bit the bullet a few years back and bought a personal copy of Producer so that I could use it at church and other functions (like the end of year high school volleyball banquet).  The Producer version lets you have more control over music, more control over the motion/zoom/pan of pictures and videos, and has lots of features for text.