How To Create Simple Customizable Photo Slideshows On Your iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create simple video slide- shows from your photos on your iPhone. 

So you would think it is really easy to create a slideshow with your photos on your iPhone. It kind of is as long as you're willing to use the Transitions and Effects that are there by default. So, for instance, you can go into the Photo's App, like this. You can select a bunch of photos. You see I have a bunch selected here. Then you could go to the More button at the top and choose Slideshow. Then you get this slideshow that goes through each of your photos. However, the transitions are going to vary. Sometimes you'll get even more than one photo at a time on the screen and sometimes you'll get them cropped in really tightly. There's a whole bunch of different things that it will do. It's great because it's going to just be that simple. When you're done with it you can just take this here, tap the More button at the top, and then Share. Then Export it out. 

But a lot of times we want much more control. Sometimes we want to do that so we can create our own transitions and choose our own options for every photo. Sometimes we want it so we can keep things simple, so it's just one photo per slide and it transitions smoothly from one to the next. Nothing fancy. 

So one way to do that is to do it in Keynote. Keynote is free from Apple. You can just get it from The App Store. It's the app you use to create presentations. If you can create a presentation that's basically just one photo per slide. So, in Keynote here I'm going to start a new Keynote presentation by choosing a theme. I'm going to choose the basic black theme right here. Nothing fancy because I'm going to have the photo cover the entire slide each time. Now by default you're going to get something that's formatted for a screen. So it's going to basically be 16 by 9. However Photos typically are 4 by 3. So let's change the presentation to be that so we don't have as much blank space on either side. I'm going to go to the More button here at the top and choose Presentation Option and then Presentation Setup. Then I'm going to go to the bottom and choose Slide Size and choose 4 by 3. Then tap the check at the top and now I have a 4 by 3 presentation. I'm not going to worry about this blank slide here that I'm starting things off with because I'm going to create slides from all of my photos. 

I'm going to do that by going back into the Photos App. I'm going to choose all the photos I want. Now it helps if you already have an album, like this, with all of your photos in it. But you could do it from the Main Library as well. I'm going to tap Select All to select everything in this album. So it really helps that I put the album together first so I can quickly choose the exact photos I want. 

Now here's the trick! You want to drag these into Keynote. The way to do that on the iPhone is to tap and hold until all the photos come together like that. Then start dragging them. Now you want to use another finger and go Home or to the App Switcher. Either way you want to go back into Keynote, like that. Now drag all of these into the Left Sidebar here. It's going to create slides, one for each photo. It may take a few seconds to create all the slides and import them. So now you've got all of these slides here and you could tap and see each one. I'm going to tap to select and then tap again to get the options for the first slide because I want to delete it. Although you could just use this as a title slide if you want. 

So now I've got my 17 photos here. I can go through them and make alterations if I like. For instance here I can take this photo and since it is vertical I can drag it to expand it and put it where I want on the slide there. You may notice on some of these don't quite fill the frame. They're a little wider than 4 by 3 and you can also see the text field behind each one. But since you haven't entered anything into them they are blank anyway. So they don't really matter. 

So now you have this nice slideshow here. You could just use it like this but it would be nice to have it transition from each slide to the next. So what I'm going to do here, is I'm going to tap again here on the first slide and then in the Menu navigate over one so I can use Select All. So now I have selected all of these. But I'm going to tap on the three dots button here and go to Animate. This will allow me to add transitions for all of the slides. You can see I've got them all selected so adding Animate there gives me Add Transition at the bottom. I can now choose one of these many great transitions here. A lot of them are really fancy and work great for slideshows like this. But I want to keep it really simple. So I think a Wipe will work really well on this. Now I've got a Wipe transition.

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I can play the slideshow to preview it. You can see every time I tap it does that Wipe like this. I'm going to pinch in with two fingers to Exit. With all the slides selected I could go back to the transition here and I could change the transition, alter it. Maybe instead of from left go from right. I can make it happen a little faster. I think I would like to do that here and make it happen pretty quick, like that. Of course I can also add a custom transition for each one of these if I want. After I'm happy with my transitions I can use the Checkbox here at the top. Now if I wanted to add something like Text to any of these I could. I can just go to the slide here, use the Paintbrush Tool and you can see how the title is on but it's behind the photo. If I turn it Off and turn it back On again it moves to the front and I can go in and Edit that text there. I can also tap the Content button here. Ignore all the rest of this but just go right to the Shapes there. I can add a textbox as well. But I'm not going to add any captions here for our example. 

I want to keep it really simple. At this point I want to export and get a video from this. So I'm going to tap the three dots button here. I can go right to Export. So when I do I can choose Movie and export it as a video. So I have a bunch of different options. The presentation right now only advances when you actually tap the screen. But, when you exported the video it will go to the next slide after a number of seconds. So I can change the number of seconds here. I can have it be, say, four seconds for each slide. I can also choose the Resolution. So I can say choose 720p and under advanced options I can choose the format. For the most universal format for Sharing, especially with Windows users, you probably want to go to H264. Now I can go to Export here and it's going to build the video. Then it'll take me to my Share Screen here. 

So I can Share it any number of ways that I want. The two primary ones you probably want to look at are Save Video, which will save it to your Photos Library. But also you could Save to File and then Save it out to any location you can access in the Files App, like iCloud, local storage, or any other thing you're connected to. 

Now here's some more tips. Once you have the slideshow here you can select any one of these and just drag to change the order. So, you can reorder these if you like. You can also go to the three dots button here and then choose Presentation Options and one of the things you can do is choose a soundtrack. So you can choose Audio from your Music Library and when you export as a video that will be included. When you're done you can use the Back Button here and you'll see your presentation in the list here. If you don't feel you need this presentation anymore you can Tap and Hold on it and then select Delete to get rid of that presentation. Or you can keep it around. You can add more photos to it by just dragging them in just like we did at the beginning. You can tap and hold and delete slides. You can tap and hold and even Hide individual slides which means that you can, say, export a shorter version of the presentation one time and then Unhide them and export a longer version of the presentation another time. There's so many steps you can do to go beyond the simple presentation if you want to. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.