Create a Slideshow With iMovie In Less Than 3 Minutes

It is easy to create a slideshow with iMovie using a photo album. In less than three minutes you can import the photos, add transitions, insert titles, and include music. You can then export the slideshow as a video to use on YouTube, your social networks, or show during a presentation.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's create a slideshow in iMovie using a photo album from Photos. We're going to add titles. We're going to add transitions. We're going to add music. We're going to produce something that you can export as a video, share to YouTube, or put on your social networks. AND we're going to do it in less than three minutes!
So starting off on the Project Screen of iMovie I'm going to create a New Movie Project. Before I do anything with this movie project I'm going to go to Preferences and I'm going to set things up so that when I import my photos they're imported the way I want them.
Photo placement is by default going to use Ken Burns which zooms in and zooms out slowly. A lot of people don't like this. It looks good but it does actually create a much bigger video because it really hurts your video compression since there is a lot of movement.
I'm going to change it to Crop to Fill instead. Photo duration of four seconds is probably a little too long for what I want. Maybe three seconds per photo. The transitions are very long so I'm going to change that to .2 seconds, a quick transition. So once I've set these preferences it's going to help me as I create this.
Then I'm going to go to My Media here in Photos Library and here I see all of my albums. I'm going to go into the album that I want. I'm going to do Command A to select all and drag them all down here. This does all the heavy lifting. Now everything is in here. I actually have got a slideshow already but it's not quite how I want it to be.
The first thing I want to do is I want to add transitions between everything. So I'm going to Command A down here since I've already clicked down here to select it. I can do Command A and it will select all of this instead of all of this. 
I'm going to go to Edit, Add Cross Dissolve. That's going to put cross dissolve transitions between each one and they are .2 seconds long just like I specified.
Now let's add a title. I'm going to go to Titles here and I'm going to drag a standard title to the beginning. I'm going to click in that and then set some of this text. Let's add something here at the end as well. Maybe if this was a professional presentation I might want a copyright notice or maybe just my Twitter handle or something for contact information at the end.
Lastly, let's add some music. So I go to Audio and I select iTunes for songs, stuff that I made in GarageBand, or sound effects. I can sort by time here and find something that is pretty long since this is 2 minutes and 31 seconds so get something that is over two minutes. Let's have it start a little bit into the slideshow. You can see how it doesn't quite reach the end there but it gets pretty close.
Now I've got audio and I'm ready to export. So I go to File, Share, and I'll do file type sharing. I'll maybe do a 720p and I'll give it a name. I'll go Next and I'll put it on the desktop as a MP4 ready to be shared wherever I want it to be.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Create a Slideshow With iMovie In Less Than 3 Minutes”

Kevin Murphy

7 years ago

Saed to desktop, as mp4, but got error message when I attempted to open it: /Users/kevinmurphy1/Desktop/Error mesage 101716.jpg
(In case that isn't readable, the message is telling me that QuickTime can't open the file.

Law Thim Fook

Gary, thanks for this video. I'm curious, what are the differences between doing this in iMovie vs exporting a Slideshow in Photos?

My error -- first save was not complete. Second effort worked perfectly. Sorry about the panic call.

P.S. Thank you for the terrific tutorial!

Gary Rosenzweig

Law: Lots of differences. You have a lot more control in iMovie. Try them both and see.

Noted, Gary. Thanks for the tip. I'll try that out next time. Btw, would the file size in iMovie be much bigger compared to Photos, i.e. for the same number of photos and possibly a couple of movies?

Law: Depends on the details. The video file size should be the same, but if you create them differently -- like with more transitions and titles and such, then it could be higher. Same for compression choices you make when exporting as video.

Much thanks for the additional tips/info, Gary.

Comments Closed.

Create a Slideshow With iMovie In Less Than 3 Minutes

Comments: 8 Responses to “Create a Slideshow With iMovie In Less Than 3 Minutes”

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