Creating Slideshows With the Clips App On Your iPhone

The Clips app from Apple can be used to create video slideshows from your photos. You can add images one-by-one with titles and captions, audio narration and filters. Then you can edit and export the result to share.
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Video Transcript

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode I'm going to show you how to create a slideshow using the Clips app on your iPhone.
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So if you don't already have the Clips app go to the App Store on your iPhone and get it. It's an app from Apple and it's free. One interesting way to use the Clips app is to simply make a video slideshow from your photos. So to demonstrate I'm going to go into the Clips app here. I'm going to switch from Camera mode to Library mode. I'm going to go into my Albums here. Now you can look through your entire Photos Library anyway that you want. I've just dived right here into an Album that's got some photos I want to use.
So to start I'm going to select one photo here that I want to start the slideshow off with. I'm just going to tap it and bring it into Clips. Now to add it to the slideshow what I need to do is use that big pink button there to record. That will record for any amount of time I want just showing that photo. It's also going to record the microphone. But if I don't say anything it won't actually keep anything. It will just assume that I want silence. Now I can see a Timeline at the bottom and it only has this one photo in it. I've recorded for five seconds and I put this photo into my slideshow for five seconds. 
I can now add a second photo. I tap Library again and I'll go and tap the second photo there and bring that in. I'm going to use the big record button to record that for five seconds. So now I've got two photos there at the bottom and I have a ten second long slideshow. Now I don't have to be silent when I'm recording. I can actually speak and narrate  what I'm seeing. So let me go into Library here. Choose a third photo and then I'm going to record but I'm going to speak. I love the canals in Venice. This is one of my favorite shots. Now when I play the slideshow the first two will be silent but the third one will actually have my voice saying that. 
Now you can also speak to add a caption on the screen. So let's choose a fourth photo here. I'm going to choose the Captions button which is that little speech bubble to the left. Then I get to choose a type of caption to add. So I've got all these different kinds and it will show me what they look like on the screen. So let's just go to the first one here and I'm going to then hit the X button to exit from that. When I speak this time over this photo it's actually going to put that as text on the screen. I love the canals in Venice. Now it didn't get it quite right. But that's okay because I can Edit it.
So let's go into editing now. So you can see at the bottom I've got the timeline there. I could actually hit the Play button to playback the slideshow. You can see it show the first one and then it's going to switch to the second one, and I can let it play the entire thing out. I'll tap the screen and tap Done. Now if I tap on one of the photos in the timeline there at the bottom, like the last one, I actually get to select it and I can see some things about it. So notice one of the things I've got there is a Mute button. Now it shows I can mute this one. I can turn the sound On or Off. I can do it for this one here too, the one that I spoke over. The first two though, because I was pretty silent when I recorded them, it's already on Mute. This assumes there is no audio it's supposed to keep on those.
Now I can also Trim. So say if I didn't want the first one to be quite as long I could hit the Trim button and then you can see I can make it a longer clip or shorter clip. When I get it to exactly what I want I can hit Apply. Now that is going to be that amount of time. So you can customize the amount of time. I didn't have to record for five seconds. I could have recorded for one second and then hit Trim and then extended it to what I want it to be. Notice when I select the last one it shows Live Titles there as an option. It wasn't selected on the first two because there's no audio.
On the third one it is. I recorded audio but I didn't actually select a title. So nothing is going to show. But for the last one I'm going to get the Live Titles there. I can tap and you can see there's the text of what I said. So now I can actually tap in there and edit the text. So I can correct the mistake and maybe even add something. You don't want to change it completely because the audio is still going to be shown. So if I change the text there what I'm saying wouldn't match what the text was. I can also edit the style here. So I can go and choose another way for the text to appear or I can choose None to just have the audio there but no text. 
Likewise I can go to this third one here and I didn't have any live text. So you can see it's set to None. But now I can actually select it there and it will actually be that text. So here is the text that I spoke there. There's more you can do as well. I can take this second one and go to Effects and I can choose another effect like say make it into a water color. You can do that while recording too. So I'll hit Done here. You can see I can Apply an Effect like a filter to the photo that's there before I record. 
I could also add more things. I can add text, a different type of text. So there's two ways to add captions. I can add text, say, to the very first one and I can tap off of it and I can drag the text around the screen to where I want. I could do other things like add stickers or emoji as well. Now I still haven't recorded this photo so it doesn't exist in the timeline but I'll do that now. So that's now the last one there. I can still go into Effects and then Text and I can edit this text by tapping on it and I can Delete it. I can change it. Do all sorts of different things. I could also select one of these and hit the Delete button if I wanted to just get rid of it completely.
You can see there's a ton of different things you can do to build your slideshow. You can even tap and drag photos around to change the order that they're in. The last thing you may want to do is tap the Music button there at the top and you could select from soundtracks, select a piece of music that you want. You could also go to My Music to select something from your music Library. That will apply to the entire slideshow. You can use that Play button to preview the entire thing. You can also tap on a photo to enter the timeline edit mode there and move things around. If you tap a specific one and I do the preview it will play from that point on.
Now to Share it all you need to do is hit the Share button at the bottom right. Here you can send it via Messages, email, Facebook, all sorts of other different ways. You also can go and tap Save Video and it will save the video to your Photos app so then you could share it from there. Notice there's a Projects button at the top left corner. Tap that and it will show this current project and you can create a new one. So if you're done with this you can Create New and create a new one otherwise it's going to remain with this project open where you can continue to edit it.
So as you can see there's a lot you can do with this. You can play around with it and create a couple sample slideshows you'll get the hang of it and then you'll be able to create quick slideshows while you're on the go of pictures that you just took. Sometimes it's more compelling to upload a short video slideshow than it is to send some individual photos.

Comments: One Comment

    John Clark
    5 years ago

    Great tips. Another capability when adding a photo to the timeline is being able to pan and zoom (Ken Burns) during the recording action. I have used that technique when i wanted to point out something to my audience.

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