How to Make Photo CD Software

Choose your burning software. There are two main options for burning a photo CD. You can use CD burning software or a photo management program; use whichever program you feel most comfortable with. Mac OS X and Windows both have burning software built-in to the operating system, but commercial alternatives, such as Nero (Windows) or BurnWorld (Mac) also exist. Photo management programs such as iPhoto (Mac) and Picasa (Windows and Mac) also have burn to disc functionality.

Choose the type of disc you want to burn. Your options will vary, depending on the software you are using to make your photo CD. If you are using your operating system's native CD/DVD burning application, you will be burning to directly to disc. Some commercial burning applications and some photo management software may offer different types of burning modes, including self-launching galleries or slideshows.

Choose the files you want to burn. If you are using a burning application, you can choose between individual files and folders. Some burning applications may also allow you to save your work as a template, so you can burn the same photo CD as many times as you would like. Photo management software may offer different kinds of flexibility when choosing photos, such as the ability to choose photos by organized albums.

Select the physical media that you want to burn to. As of 2010, most optical media burners can handle both CD and DVD media. CD media can hold about 768 megabytes (MB) worth of data while DVDs can range between 4.37 gigabytes (GB) to 8.75 GB of data, depending if the disc is single layer or dual layer. Choose the disc that is most appropriate for the amount of data you will be burning to disk.

Burn the disc. Once you have selected the files and inserted the optical media, you can burn your disc. The time it takes to burn the disc will depend on the size of the disc and the speed of your CD/DVD burner.

Test the disc. After the disc has finished burning, test that it functions correctly by putting it back in the tray.