Slideshow software

Many solid state media players , will play a slide show of images from a USB flash drive
Rather than tie up the laptop and spend money on software
Look at the under $50 media players
You won't even have to create the slide show
Just load the pictures on the flash drive
Plug flash into media player
Player into tv, video input
And choose slide show from the media player menu

Windows picture viewer has a "slide show" button, and comes with every version of Windows I can remember.

al

I have used Irfan View to make a slide show. It is free software.

If you don't mind advancing to the next picture manually, put the photos you want to show in the same folder and number them so they are in the correct order.

I connect my laptop to the TV with an HDMI cable.

I think that the media player will be the best idea for what I want. Now just to fine one cheap that will do what I need.

Use your current laptop and Windows picture viewer would be the simplest way to accomplish what you want.

However, if you don't wish to tie up your laptop then you could check out the Raspberry Pi. It will do what you want, initial cost is <$40 but you'll also need a 5VDC power supply (have an old cell phone charger laying around?), keyboard, mouse and an SD card for it. You can install Raspbmc on it which is a version of the media center software XBMC customized to run on the Pi.

I use the screensaver and a hot corner to activate the slideshow. You should be able to point it to the folder with the pictures and you are good to go.

If you decide to run the slideshow from a pc, FastStone Image Viewer has a nice slide show feature.

Fred