Personally, I would use Lightroom. They have some really nice slide show templates. You can even add text. You could also just render a movie from lightroom and add titles in Premiere Pro using a MOGRT.
If you really want to customize something in After Effects come up with three or four interesting transitions between two images and save them as animation presets. Resize the Images using the batch feature in Photoshop or Lightroom so they are all going to have the same vertical size and be big enough that they will never be more than 100% scale and sequentially number them and put them in one folder. Import the images by browsing to the folder, make sure all images are selected in the order you want them to appear, make sure Import as an Image Sequence is NOT selected, and import creating a comp. you will have the option to select the length of each layer and the overlap. Set the length to 3 seconds and the overlap to about 1 second and create the comp. You will have a new comp with all 217 images.
Here comes the fun part. Open up the animation presets you have created in the Effects and Presets panel. Go to the in point of one of the layers and apply the preset, then repeat for each layer.
The last part is easy, Import the audio track from the principal and create a new comp from the audio. Set some markers where the names change. Import your sequenced images comp and apply time remapping. Set a keyframe every time an image changes. Reveal the keyframes in the timeline for time remapping and start dragging the keyframes for time remapping to the markers you set in the audio track. This will sync everything up.
If you added the name overlays when you batch process all of the images you're done. If you need to add them now it's just a matter of editing some text layers.
If you create your animation presets based on the in and out point of the layers you can select all the layers at once and apply the preset to all of them. Give Fly-in, Bounce, Drop Out a try. It's not suitable for a graduation slideshow but it will show you how to write an expression based on the layer in and out points.
After all that - one more suggestion. Keep it simple and clean. Fancy transitions, zooms, flips, page turns, get really boring very quickly, The most important part of the story is the seniors, you should get a good look at them. Nobody is going to be impressed with the transitions and most of the time, fancy transitions detract from the story you are trying to tell. How many transitions to you see in a feature film?
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