Creating Slideshows With Multiple Concurrent Transitions

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to make a photo slideshow Keynote where multiple images transition onto the slide at the same time. 

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So you often see videos now that are slideshows for real estate, travel, or events featuring multiple photos and the photos transition onto the slide at the same time. Here's an example of what it looks like. (playing example). Now let's build that. We're going to do that in Keynote. In Keynote I'm going to select a basic white theme here. I'm going to make sure I'm using a wide-screen theme since that's what video uses. Then I'm going to start with this first slide here. I'm going to get rid of the text on it. Of course your slides may actually include text as well but in this tutorial I'll just focus on the images. So let's bring in an image here. Then the idea is that this image will take up only a portion of the slide. Let's have this one appear on the left here and be very vertical. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to double click it and I'm going to bring the edges in, cropping part of the image out. I can move the image over to reveal what I want to show in the part that will be visible. This part here. So I'll click Done and then I could resize this image here and maybe put it here as a  vertical image.Let's bring in a few others and do the same thing. (showing example). Now we can have these transition in. So, for instance,  we could use a Wipe transition. Have this Wipe down from the top. Let's go ahead and do that here under Animate, Build-in, Add an Effect, and I'm going to choose Wipe. I'm going to have it Wipe from the top and then I'm going to change it so it's a pretty quick Wipe, like that. I can Preview it and you can see how it Wipes like that. Let's do this one but add a build-in effect that's Wipe and let's have that go from the bottom. We'll also have that go for half a second and we can Preview that. Let's have this one come from the top as well. So Wipe from the top for half a second and then let's have this one come in from the right. So Wipe from the right for half a second. We could see how that looks.

Now if we were to Preview this entire slide here, I'll press Play. I have to click to go and for each one of those you could see it appears like that. Now what would be great is if they happen automatically. So to do that I'm going to go to Build Order and Build Order, first I'm going to take this first element here and have it start after the transition. The second one I'm going to have it start at the same time. I'm going to do that for each one of these. So each one will happen at the same time. I can actually use the Preview button here to preview it all. So I'll hit Preview and you could see how they all come in at the same time. Now what would be even better is if they didn't come in at exactly the same time. But they don't have to wait for each one to complete. So I can go to the second one here and say, Yes go with Build 1 but delay slightly, one-tenth of a second. This one also delay one-tenth of a second. That will delay one-tenth of a second after the one before it. This one, one-tenth. So these three won't all happen at the same time. They will each be delayed one-tenth of a second from the one before it. Now when we Preview we can see they kind of all wipe in at the same time but this one starts first and then each one follows in suit creating a very nice effect. 

Let's add another slide here. I'll use a blank slide and this time we'll create something that looks a little bit different. We'll have four very vertical pieces. So I will bring in this image here. I'm going to then double click it to crop and crop it to make it pretty vertical. Let's make it like 500 pixels wide and Done. I'm going to move that over here and I'm going to do the same thing with three other images. (bringing in other images.)

So now that I've got these I'm going to shrink them a little bit. So I want, basically, this one to stick kind of to the bottom here. So I'm going to make it say 900 high. Now I'll do the same for each one of these. They'll snap to each other so they will each be 900 high. Now I'm going to make these snap to the top like that and I'm going to space them apart. To make sure they are even I'm going to select them all and go Arrange, Distribute Objects, Horizontally. Now let's have these move in from the top and bottom. So, this one here I'll Add An Effect. Instead of Wipe, I'll do Move-In. I'll do From the Bottom. This one I'll do Move-In From the Top and this one Move-In From the Bottom, and this one Move-In From the Top. Now I can actually select all of these and change, you could see it says multiple directions there, but I can chance them all to be, you know, something quicker like .75 and I can turn off Bounce for each one of those. 

Now if I were to go and look at the Build Order for this, Preview it, after I change them all to, say, Happen After the Previous Build, each one if going to happen on its own, like that. Which is nice. But let's have them all happen, at least the three later ones, with the previous build. So now they all happen together. Then we can still do a delay for each one of .1 second so it happens like that. So it looks very cool. Kind of organic because they are all coming in in a slightly different times. You don't even have to have them all coming in in order. So I could have this one coming in first, this one, this one, and this one if I wanted to. So that's another way to do it. 

Now let's create another slide here. I'll create a blank slide and let's put some images on that as well. This time I'll have these basically fill up just a portion of the screen for each one. It will be the same size, like that. But what I want to do here is in addition to adding a Wipe from the left in that case and this one we'll do a Wipe from the bottom and then we'll do Build Order and we'll have this one happen after the transition. This one happen with Build 1 with a slight delay. Now we can Preview these like that. What would be nice is to have something in the background actually happening. So I'm going to bring in a background graphic right here. I'm going to make this really big. It's going to cover the entire background. I'm going to go off to the edge here. I'll actually want to zoom out a little bit. So I have it go like that and to like that and position right there. What I'm going to do is go to Format, Image, and I'm going to click on the Color Controls there. I'm going to play with those. I'm going to decrease the Contrast and increase the Saturation a bit like that. So it's kind of more of a background. I'm going to Arrange and send it to the back so it's behind those images. So now if I go and I want to Preview the Build Order here you can see that there's something better than a solid color background. 

What would be even better is this moved. It was kind of animated. So what I'm going to do with this is Animate it and I'm actually going to go to Action and then go to Move. Now I get this line here. So it Starts here and I want it to End like here. But I want to do it over a long period of time. Like say 6 seconds. Maybe the total length of the slide. Then this I'm going to have happen with Build 1. I actually want it to start at the beginning. I want to put it all the way at the beginning here. So it starts after Transition. The background is always moving from the very beginning. Then this one is going to happen with Build 1 but let's delay it one second. This one will happen with Build 1 as well, one-tenth of a second after the first one. So now you could see the background image is moving right from the get go and then those two images come in and the background image continues to move. I want to go in here and also change Ease In and Ease Out to None. So it's kind of a linear movement. Now you get that kind of thing. You can add a background like that on any of those slides I did before. 

Now let's add another slide here. I want to do something a little different. I'm going to get creative with shapes. So I'm going to create two triangle shapes and I'm going to stick them in the corner here and increase the size quite a bit. I'm going to Option Drag to duplicate this and I'm going to Format and what we can do here is, Under Arrange, I'm will Rotate. I'm going to do 180 degrees. That's it. There we go now it's in the upper left hand corner there. I'm going to add another shape that is a rectangle. This rectangle I'm actually going to rotate this 45 degrees and then have this fit in like that. Now let's make sure these are squared off here. You can see the width and height should match. Let's do 800 and 800 and the same thing here. So these are right angles. Then I could put this here in the middle and then increase the size a bit. Then I'm going to Option Drag to duplicate that and I've got a second one here.  So now I've got these shapes here. Let's put some images in them. So I'm going to drag an image to here and position it. I'm going to drag an image to here and position that. I don't want this corner to be exposed here so I'm going to enlarge it a little bit. I'm going to drag another image to here and also increase the size. Then another image here and make sure that also covers everything. So that's how that looks there. 

Now let's add some movement into this. I can then go to Animate, Build In, Add an Effect, and let's move in from the left. Let's move in but from the right. I could, if I want, go from the top right so let's see what that looks like, like that. Maybe let's do those. Let's turn off Bounce for those. Now this one we can have it go straight down. Move in from top to bottom. This one Move In from bottom to top. Let's turn off Bounce for both of those like that. Let's bring up the Build Order now to sort them all out. So we want to basically select them All and say they all start After Previous Build. Select these three and say With Previous Build. No Delay. Let's Preview it. Get a nice effect like that. So now I have a nice effect there. 

So we have four slides here with four different ways of bringing things in. Now let's go and complete this with Build Outs. So here, when this slide is done, what we want it to do is buildout really nicely. So we're going to go to Animate here.  I'm going to select all four of these. Build Out. Add an Effect. In this case let's try Dissolve. So now they will each dissolve. Like that. Let's bring up the Build Order. I'm going to select just the last three and say, With the Previous Build. This one is not going to wait for a click. It's going to do After Build 4. So Build 4 will have to finish. Then this one will happen. But let's put a delay in there. A delay of 4 seconds or 3 seconds and now let's Preview the entire thing. They'll Wipe in. Three seconds and then they all dissolve out. What would be really cool is if they dissolved out in slightly different times. So this one will do it .2 delay. Another .2 delay and another .2 delay. You can drag and drop these into a different order if you wanted to. So let them all build in like that. Wait 3 seconds and now they all fade out like that. Really nice. 

Now let's do the same thing with this except we already have these moving in like that. So should we have them move out. Should we have them fade out. There are a lot of different things that we can do. Let's select each one of these and look at the Build Out options here. Let's choose Fade and Move and we can Preview this and see what it looks like. Like that. Of course we're going to choose different directions. We'll choose all of those and then we'll go to each one here. This one here will go top to bottom. This one will go bottom to top. Top to bottom. Bottom to top. Then we'll select these three here With Previous Build. This one will be After Build 4 with a 3 second delay. So now they build in like that and they build out like that. 

So for each slide, basically, you want to kind of want to design a layout like this. Then you want to go and figure out what you want for the Build In and the Build Out for each one of these. If you're going to do a background then you're going to probably set a Build In or Build Out for the background. Simply have that as the Action. Then you're going to want to make sure that the Build Order reflects exactly how you want to do things. This is where most people make mistakes. You want to make sure each thing is exactly what you want. The first item should be after transition. If you want it to be automatic all the other items should be either With Build or After Build. You should pay attention to the delays for each one to get everything just right.

Then, of course, you can continue to complete your slideshow. Add text. Add different things for each slide. When you're done Export it as a video and you have a nice dynamic slideshow. Something that others might create in a video editing tool but you could do it pretty simply in Keynote.