Creating Video Slideshows In Photos

A quick and easy way to create a video slideshow with your photos is to use the built-in Slideshow function in the Photos app. You can just select some photos, stick with the defaults, and get a video to upload to YouTube or Facebook in less than a minute. Or, you can customize the theme, individual photos, text and more to create something a little more specific.

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

Video Transcript: Let's say you want to create a video slideshow. A slideshow of your photos that's a video. You could upload it to Facebook or You Tube, or wherever. You can create a highly customized video in iMovie or Keynote. But it takes a lot of work and know how to do so. If you want to have something that's really simple to make you can do it directly in Photos. It's not as customizable but it's really quick to create a video.
The way you do it is you select a bunch of photos. I've selected some here. You could select some inside of an album or whatever you want to. You'll be able to add more later. So you select some to start. Then you go to File and Create and then Slideshow. Now I'm going to choose a name and hit OK. It creates a slideshow. If you're looking for where this is located look in your sidebar here and under My Projects, you may have to open it up here, you'll see Video Slideshows. So you can always get back to it later. 
Now this is the slideshow creation interface here. You see the slideshow here in the middle. You see all the photos here along the strip in the bottom. You can drag and rearrange the order of things. So just drag these around back and forth. You can control click on them and select to delete slides to get rid of something. If you want to add a photo you can do it many ways. One is to hit this plus button here and say Add Photos and you'll be able to select more photos to add.
Notice that at the beginning of the slideshow there's a piece of text here. So there's a photo and a piece of text over that photo. So you can just click at the text here and edit it with whatever you want. If you want to delete it you can select here and hit the delete key and it deletes the text. Command Z to undo. For any other slide you can add text to it. So you click on the slide that you want. Hit that plus button there and you can see it says Add Text. You can add a piece of text over that. So you can put captions for all these photos or just some of them.
Now there are a lot of different options here. You can click on these three buttons on the right. The first one here allows you to choose the theme. The Ken Burns theme actually fades from one position of the photo to another. So, you know, you preview it there and you can see how the photo is kind of moving. Origami is this kind of a funny little flip thing where the photos flip into place. You've got Reflections. You can play around with all of these and see which one you want. They each have some sort of music that comes with it.
The two that are a little more customizable are Ken Burns and Classic. Classic allows you to do several things with each slide. I'll show you that one first. Let's look here and you can also click on the music and you can use the default, Classic music, because it's a classic theme or you can choose a song from your library. If you click here for timings you can, for all the themes, choose Fit to Music, so it plays as long as the song is and just stretches out each slide to fit, or a custom amount of time. 
You can also select an individual slide and then check Place Selected For and then up the amount of time or remove the amount of time. You can see there's a little watch or clock icon there saying there's special timing for this one. So you can make one last a little longer or slower by selecting it and hitting that checkbox.
Now Transitions here that's something special for Classic mode only. It wouldn't be there for the other ones. You can choose the transition. So you can do a push transition. You can see a preview down here what direction it goes. The speed of the transition. You can also select, for most of the themes, Scale Photos to Fit on Screen. You see the black bars here because the screen is wider than the photo. But if I were to uncheck that you can see how it will not have any black bars there. So you get to choose there. So you can choose what you want here but you don't get this option, say, if I were to go and do Origami here. You can see how I only get Fit to Music and Custom there. 
Now if you choose Ken Burns you get this little button here you can click and then you can actually set the Start and the End position. So I can zoom in and say I want to start in the upper left hand corner and look at the end there and zoom in and say I want to be down at the lower right hand corner. Now when I preview this, play this, you can see how it obeys those two commands. It goes from the one spot to the other.
So you have all of that. You have all those options. You can rearrange things, add more text, work with it in all sorts of different ways but it's not super complex. It's super easy to work with and most of the time you can just basically go with the defaults and get it done in no time at all. Then hit Export here and export then allows you to choose the resolution. You probably want to choose the highest because these are photos so they're probably much higher resolution anyway. Then Save it out as a video file. You can upload that video to YouTube or Facebook or whatever. You have a quick video slideshow without having to learn how to use iMovie or Keynote and customize it.

Comments: 11 Responses to “Creating Video Slideshows In Photos”

Pavla Bajgar

6 years ago

Thank you , Gary. I was needing this many time and didn't know how to do the slideshows in Photo. Does Photo make a collage pictures? I sure miss that.
pb

Gary Rosenzweig

Pavla: Not sure what you mean by a collage. Do you mean having many pictures on one page? You could always use File, Print to make that as a PDF.

Allan

Gary, it would be helpful if you could do a iPad version of creating a video from photos in an album on iOS devices. Whilst I can do such a slideshow, is there a way to put titles on the individual photos? Also, the music I choose from my iTunes library can be the sountrack for the slideshow, but can I attach different tunes to different slideshows from different albums? At present the same music applies to all slideshows. Thanks

Allan: On the iPad the best way to create custom slideshow videos is to use iMovie or Keynote. That's what I would do. While you can play basic slideshows on Photos for iPad, you can't create a Slideshow "project" like I show here in this tutorial.

Richard Stiers

If a video slideshow is created in Photos on a Mac and saved to Photos iCloud where all my photos get stored, would it then be accessible on iPad or iPhone to use as an Instagram post?

Richard: If you saved the video file to your iCloud Photos library then it should be available wherever you can access your iCloud Photos library. So yes, it should work.

Gary. Thanks for your comments on the best route as regards using an iPad for to create a custom video of photos. Thanks also to Richards for a possible work around. Allan

Martin Kimeldorf

Best I've seen on Photo shows...I relied on old iPhoto. So now after watching this I can do all that in the newer Photos app. One question remains. I like to apply the Ken Burns to individual slides for emphasis. Can one still select an individual slide and apply a custom Kens Burns to an individual slide?

Martin: Yes. I show that at about 4:40.

Vanessa Grey

How would I fit the photos? Some heads are cutoff.

Vanessa: The photos shouldn't be cropped, if that is what you mean. I tried using photos of all different sizes, and it always resized them to fit the whole photo. Which version of Photos are you using? Have you checked the original photos?

Comments Closed.

Creating Video Slideshows In Photos

Comments: 11 Responses to “Creating Video Slideshows In Photos”

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