Have you ever wanted to display your treasured digital photo collection in the living room TV instead of your computer? It certainly makes sense to do this if you're showing off your pictures to many friends or family members. You wouldn't want your guests to crowd around that crummy computer screen would you?

Well, there are many ways to display photos on TV. Let's step through the various options in this article.

Option 1: Use the Digital Camera

The most obvious way to display digital photos on TV is to make use of your digital camera itself. Most, if not all digital cameras these days come with a video-out cable. Simply connect one end of the cable to the video-out of the camera and the other end to the video-in of the TV. Simple as that – play back the pictures on the camera and they will display beautifully on the TV.

The drawback of this approach, of course, is that you can only show the photos available on the memory card within the camera. So if you only have a 32MB memory card installed, then you probably show very few pictures.

Option 2: Use a Photo Viewing Device

Another approach is to use a photo viewing device. One device I which has served me well is the SanDisk Digital Photo Viewer. This neat little device sits on top of your TV set and it accepts popular memory cards like CompactFlash, MultiMedia, Secure Digital, SmartMedia and MemoryStick as input. There is a video-out port to connect the device to the TV. In summary, this approach is similar to using a digital version of a 35mm slide projector, so to speak.

I've also noticed some DVD players coming out in the market which accept memory cards as input. One of these is the Sampo DVE-631CF. It's a reasonably priced DVD player which also allows you to play back MP3s and JPEGs from both CD-R/RW and CompactFlash Type I cards.

However, whichever of the above options you choose, you're still limited by the amount of memory available on your memory card. Hence, if you have a small capacity memory card, you probably can't show to many pictures at one go.

Option 3: Use a DVD Burner

The best approach of all, in my opinion, is to convert your digital photos to DVD format. The DVD you create can then be played back in any DVD player to display all your pictures as a slideshow. The chief advantage of this approach over the others is that you can store many, many photos on a 4GB DVD-R. It's also pretty convenient to send a DVD of pictures (instead of a memory card) to your friends or family members who live faraway.

All you need is a DVD burner and some special software. The best software I've found for doing this is Photo2DVD Studio. With its easy-to-use wizards, this software allows you to convert all your digital photos to DVD in a few simple steps. What's more, you can add special effects to your photo slideshow, including transitions, music and DVD menus. There's a full set of tutorials at the Photo2DVD website to guide you if you have doubts.

Once you've converted them to DVD format, the software burns them into a DVD-R for you. Then simply pop the DVD into any DVD player and play back your picture slideshow.

Conclusion

This article has shown you three options for displaying photos on your TV set. Displaying photo slideshows on the TV certainly makes sense when you have many guests wanting to view your photos. Whichever option you choose is up to you, but I feel that the best approach, as mentioned above, is to convert your photo slideshows to DVD/VCD format. Good luck and happy sharing!