Create Beautiful Photo Slideshows In Mac Keynote

While you can use iMovie or Photos to create slideshows, Keynote is probably the most advanced tool with the most options. You can quickly import many photos onto individual slides. Then you can work with each slide to scale and adjust each photo. You can add text and transitions. You can even create a Ken Burns effect by moving and scaling a photo over time. Once you have perfected your slideshow, you can export it as a video to share. You can also record naration to include in the video.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can make great looking photo slideshows using Keynote on your Mac.
MacMost is supported by viewers just like you. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content.
So I know a lot of people like to create photo slideshows on their Mac and there are several tools that you can use to do it. You can do it in the Photos app or in iMovie for instance. But I think the most advanced tool for creating slideshows is to use Keynote. Keynote gives you a lot of control over the photos. Where they are place, how they look, and how you place things like text on each slide.
First let's create our new document in Keynote. Now you want to choose between standard or wide ratio. The advantage of standard is a lot of photos are 4 x 3 ratio and it fits the standard format here. Wide, however, is exactly the ratio of most modern television sets. So if you're planning on presenting this on a TV or projector then you probably want to use wide. Now you certainly can choose one of the templates here but I'm just going to start with the standard black template here. I'm going to zoom out so I can see everything around the slide. I'm not going to pay too much attention to this first slide here. I'm just going to go and start bringing photos into the slideshow.
There are a few ways to do that. One is to go into your Photos app and go to an Album or select a group of photos. You could actually select these and drag them straight into the left sidebar of Keynote. However for the best quality what you want to do is Export them first. To Export is pretty easy. You can create a new folder to hold them. So I'm going to click on the desktop here and do File, New Folder. I've got this folder here and then I can drag and drop them in. If I want ultimate control over the quality then I can go to File and then Export and then I could choose the Export options here precisely.
Now I've got a folder here and it's filled with the images I want to use. I can simply drag and drop those into Keynote. So I'm going to bring up both windows here. You could see I've got the sidebar right there. I could select all the photos and drag them into the left sidebar. I want to make sure that the blue line there is all the way to the left so that it's even underneath the first slide, not as a subsection under the first slide. I'll drop those in. Now I've got a bunch of slides here with each photo on it. I could have done it one at a time creating a slide, dragging a single photo into it, and then going on to the next slide.
I could also go to any slide I want. I could click on Media and go to Photos and then access my photos from there and add them one at a time. But it's nice and easy to quickly add those twelve and now I can work with them.
If I look at one of these slides here I could see that there are some default text fields here. I don't really want that. So I'm going to select all those slides, by Shift clicking on them and selecting them all, and go to Format and Change Master and select blank as the master. So that gets rid of all that extra text. I also want to get rid of this first slide here so I just have the ones with pictures on it. If I want I could easily rearrange these photos by clicking on a slide and then dragging it moving it up and down the list. I want to make sure I don't move it too far over to the right. You could see this blue line move under and make this photo part of a section belonging to the slide before it. So keep everything on an even level.
Now since I chose the wide screen version of the template I have 4x3 photos inside of a 16x9 frame so I have black bars on the left and right. I want to drag the edges to have the photo fill the space. I can have it use more of the top or more of the bottom. I can also just make the photo much larger and zoom in on a section of the photo if I want. The next thing you may want to do is add some text to the slide. With Keynote you have so much versatility with this. Let's start by clicking on Text here at the top to create a new text box. You'll see it appear. By default it's going to appear as the Caption style here and it's going to be pretty small as compared to the size of the photo.
Let's add some text. Now we can style it. I'm going to choose a nicer looking font like Minion Pro and I'm going to make it much larger. Something that will kind of fit and be easier to see when looking at the slide show. I can drag it anywhere I want on the slide. So I can put it here at the bottom center or maybe a little over to the left. I want to go and make this not bold to make it look even nicer. I'm going to use the same style and everything here every time I insert a new piece of text. So I'm going to Update the Caption style by using that button there. Now when I create a new text field it should look just like this. 
If I want to text to standout more I can add a shadow underneath it by clicking on the Advanced Options here. Then enable Shadow. Once you do that you can set the amount of the blur. You can have the Offset and how opaque the shadow is. Also change the color if you want. So I'm going to make it a little blurrier here but have less of an Offset. As a matter of fact I can choose zero offset and basically have the blur just become a slow behind the text. 
You can also choose an outline if you want. This will make the text standout even more. I could choose a black outline and set it to something smaller than 1 point. I could use ½ point there to make this text have a black outline around it. This will help it standout against a lighter background. Here's one reason you may want that. Notice here the text at the bottom goes across dark and light areas. So it's hard to read in some points. So if I select that and I go to Advanced and I add a shadow to it I can make the shadow a glow by having no offset, add a blur to it, keep it black and you can see it's a little bit easier to read it across the light areas. Adding an outline, even just of ½ point black, makes it standout even more.
Now sometimes you don't want the photo to fill the entire area of the slide so you can make it a little but smaller and then move it over to the edge there. When you do this you can assign a border to it. So you can so something like a picture frame border. You can use this one here, scale up the little corners. Now I've got these little corners here that make it look like the photo is pasted onto a page. Then you could take a shape here, just add a box shape, and have it fill the entire thing and move that behind the image. So go to Arrange and Send It Back. Let's change that to a nicer color. I'll go to Style. I'll use the color wheel here and change it to a  nicer color. You could even have it be kind of a texture. So if you go and instead of Color Fill to Advanced Image Fill by default you get this nice texture here. You can add your own if you happen to have some textures and then you can choose the color for the texture. Say you want to colorize it and now you've got something a little nicer. 
Now you can add the text next to it. So I'm have a text box here and I'm going to move it to the side and set a width for it and add some text. So there I've added some text here and I've placed it down at the lower right hand corner and left justified it. Note that you can change a lot of things about text. So I can go in here and I can change, say, the line spacing. I want to select all the text and you can see it's set to line spacing by the number of lines. Let's go to Exactly and let's set a point size. So instead of 89 maybe 80 point. You can see that looks a little nicer there. 
When doing slideshows you probably want to think about the transitions from one frame to the next. So select the first slide and go to Animate you'll see Transitions and you can Add an Effect. Then you can choose from all these different ones some of which work better for slideshows than others. So you've got some standard things like Push, or Reveal. Try all the different ones out to see which ones you like or you can use just something simple like Dissolve. You can go to each slide and add a transition to go to the next slide or you can select a whole group of slides and add the same transition for all of them.
Now you can also add transitions for showing elements on the slide. So, for instance, this text doesn't have to appear here right away. You could select the text itself, go to Animate, and select Build In. You can add an effect just for the text to appear. So anyone will work but the one I think looks the best for slideshows is Fade and Scale. You can see how it looks there. It has a very nice effect and it looks like something you may see in an Apple Keynote or commercial. Now when you set one of these be sure to click on Build Order and you'll see that one animation here for the slide. With it selected you'll see when it starts. Here it's going to start on Click. So you click to go to the slide and then you have to click again to reveal the text. If you want the text to appear automatically you want to select After Transition. You can select a delay if you want so have the image show up for a second before the text does. Now I can preview what this looks like. You can see for a second there's no text and then the text appears. 
Now you can also have this photo appear with a transition as well as the text. So in this case we can select the photo. I can do Animate, Build In, Add an Effect and have this appear with something like a Move In transition. Then I can select this text and I can add that same Fade and Scale that we saw before. Now when you go to Build Order you see both of these there. First one is the one for the image and I want that to start after the transition. Then the second one I also want that to start after Build 1, so after the picture comes in then the text will appear with a one second delay after that. So no more clicks are needed after you go to the slide. Now when I click on Preview you'll see the picture move in, one second go by, and then the text comes in.
Now you can also animate images a little bit. A lot of slideshows will use the Ken Burns Effect to kind of slowly zoom in or move away from the center of the photo or something. So we can do that here. First let's position the photo as we want it to appear when it first comes up on the slide. So maybe just have it fill the frame right there. Then I'm going to go to Animate, Action, Add an Effect. I'm going to start with just a Move effect. You can see there it does this sample move with a line. The start point of the animation and the end point of the animation. We can move the end point anywhere we want. We can see it change a little bit. Now we can also click Add Action and add Scale so now we have both Move and Scale. If we click Build Order we'll see them both. So let's take care of that first.
We've got Move and that happens on click. We want to have it happen after Transition. Then we have Scale. We want to have that happen with Build One. So Scale at the same time it's moving. We also can use this to go between changing the settings. So I can select Move and then I can set it to a duration like 6 seconds. Then also go to Scale and have that go to 6 seconds as well so they both fill the same amount of time. Now with one of these two selected I can change the Move and Scale. So this is showing me exactly how things are going to look at the end. See it overlaying the existing image there. I want to have the building kind of in the middle and you can see it's enlarged. If I click off of this so neither of these are selected now I'm looking at the original one again. So here is the final result and here is the original one. I can use the Preview button at the bottom to see what that looks like. You can see how that slowly moves in to the building there. Now I can also select this and change the acceleration to None which I think will work better. I'll do this for both Move and Scale and try the Preview now. You can see that's a nice kind of effect there.
So next you might want to add music to your slideshow. You can do that by clicking on Document here and then going to Audio. Here you can drag and drop any Sound File here. I can go to the Music app for instance and find a song and drag that in. I can drag a MP3 file in there. Any kind of background music. I can create something in GarageBand if I want and drag it in there. You can have more than one song in there. So you can add several different songs. Know that you can set the volume for each song as you select it there. You can also select if the soundtrack will loop through or just play through the list once.
Now when you're done building your slideshow you can certainly present it here using Keynote and that may be what you want. But if you wanted to upload it somewhere and share it with somebody who doesn't have Keynote then you probably want to Export it to a movie. You can set the timing when to go to the next slide. For instance if you want each slide to be ten seconds long you can set it for that. You can also set the resolution. So you can do it at a lower resolution for a smaller file size or a full high def for the best quality.
Now if you want to narrate your slideshow you can do that.  Go to the first slide and then you can go to Play and hit Record Slideshow. What this will do is it will give you this recording mechanism here and you can hit Record, Record Audio and advance through the slideshow by clicking just like if you were presenting in front of an audience. But it's recording what you're saying into the Mac's microphone. Then when you're done with that if you go to File, Export, Movie you can choose slideshow recording and it will export out the slideshow using the narration that you recorded plus the timing. So if you paused for 20 seconds on a slide to talk about it it'll be there for the 20 seconds. If you were only on a slide for three seconds it will be there for three seconds. 
There is so much more that you can do. For instance you can put more than one photo on a particular slide and arrange them how you like. You can adjust images changing things like color, brightness, and contrast. You can include shapes like circles and arrows to point things out in your photos. If you want to create beautiful slideshows on your Mac, I think Keynote is really the tool that you should try to master.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Create Beautiful Photo Slideshows In Mac Keynote”

Linda Taylor

5 years ago

Thank you so much, Gary. I had no idea that Keynote had so many capabilities. I didn't hear you mention if these techniques are new in Catalina or if we users of Mojave can use these same techniques. I see many iMovie capabilities in Keynote now, so are there any advantages to iMovie now? The last time I used iMovie I was not at all impressed, so moving to Keynote might be a better choice for me!

Gary Rosenzweig

Linda: None of these things are new. They all go back several versions, and most go back to the first version of Keynote. Try them.
iMovie is mainly for editing video. There's no comparison to Keynote when it comes to that. Keynote is for creating presentations. But if you are creating slideshows there is a lot you can do with either one.

Cameron C. Cook

Hi Gary, great article. I've never used Keynote but, with the help of this video, I certainly will start. Thanks!

Douglas Brace

For me, I have found it easier to use "Insert > Record Audio" instead of "Play > Record Slideshow" for narration. Doing it this way allows you to record the narration in segments instead of all at once (very helpful if you had a pet or others around) and to trim the beginning and end of the narration of each slide. It also means that you do not have to start over if you mess up. The downside is that you still need to actually record the slideshow but all of the narration has already been done.

Steve Cottrell

Thanks, Gary.
I am discovering that I do not make good screen scraping videos using Quicktime. Think I'll try Keynote, sounds like I can produce better quality, "slow-motion", i.e., Keynote using series of short sound bites instead of a long (5 minute or so) single video. Makes me appreciate the high quality of your videos and tutorials!

Comments Closed.

Create Beautiful Photo Slideshows In Mac Keynote

Comments: 5 Responses to “Create Beautiful Photo Slideshows In Mac Keynote”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information