How To Make and Export a Slideshow On Your iPhone

You can quickly and easily made a slideshow in the Photos app, but those can't be exported to share. By using the free iMovie app from Apple, you can build a slideshow from a set of photos in minutes and then export it as video to share. You can also customize each photo with filters, cropping, movement and text. You can add music, audio and narration to the slideshow too. The basic idea works on the iPad as well.

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

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create a slideshow on your iPhone so you can export it as a video to share.
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So if you've ever created a slideshow on your iPhone you may have been frustrated by the fact that you can't really seem to share it in any way. What you've probably done is gone into the Photos app and then chosen photos like, for instance, all the photos in this album. Then you could use the Share button at the bottom and choose Slideshow. Then you get this great slideshow and you can even setup options like the music to use, speed, and thing like that. You could play it and you could even send it via AirPlay to an Apple TV or other device. But you can't export it as a video or share it in someway on social media. To do that you're going to have to use another app.
One that you can get for free is iMovie from Apple if you don't already have it on your iPhone you can download it for free from the App Store. iMovie can be used for all sorts of things. Editing your video when creating little video projects. But you can also use it to quickly create slideshows from your photos. Let's go into iMovie here and create a new project.
I'm going to choose a movie type project. Then it's going to ask me to select some video or photos to get started. Since I want to create a slideshow here I'm going to go into Photos. Actually I'm going to go into Albums and choose that same album. So here I am in that album and I'm going to go and select all of the photos in it. Then I'm just going to tap Create Movie. Now actually this is all I need to do if I don't want to customize it in any way. I can scroll back and forth with my finger and see all the photos are there in that order and I can Play and it will play through them.
At this point I can be done and I can Export. But I can also customize some things. Notice how each photo kind of moves. It goes from one point and one zoom level to another. This is called the Ken Burns effect. If you tap on the photo in the timeline there, you can see it gets a yellow outline, now I can tap the Clip button there at the left and I can set the In and Out zoom and position for the Ken Burns effect. So I can, say, move this over a little bit and go over here and say I want it to end there maybe zoomed in. Or I can simply tap where it says Ken Burns enabled to turn it off. 
Now I'm still going to have to choose where to zoom in because photos are naturally a 4 by 3 ratio whereas video is 16 by 9. In other words video is very rectangular and photos are a lot closer to square. So you need to be able to crop a little bit off the top and bottom for it to fit. That's one of the reasons the Ken Burns effect is the default is because you can show more of your photo that way. 
You can make other changes as well. For instance I can tap on the Transition marker in-between each photo. I can set it to a different type of transition like sliding or wiping or fading or even none. I can set the amount of time for a photo. I can shrink it or enlarge it so that photo is on the screen longer. I can tap here to set a filter for that photo so it changes how it looks. I can tap the T button there and add some text using one of these text templates here and then I could just tap the text, type some text, and put a caption on it. It might be useful to do say on your first photo and your last photo if you're not going to do it for any of the others even.
If you tap off of any of the photos in the timeline you'll have a little Settings button at the bottom right and you could tell it to use the music from the Theme. You can notice that there are themes there at the bottom. Simple theme is probably what you want most of the time but you can use some of those other themes as well. You can also set whether it fades in at the beginning or fades out at the end. You can set a filter at the top for the entire slideshow. 
You can also, anytime you want, hit the Plus button to add more things. So you can add another photo. You can add another video. You can add some audio. So just a piece of music or some sound effects that you could put there in the timeline. You can actually record directly from your camera or use Voice Over to record your voice and create narration for this slideshow.
Now when you're done just hit the Done button at the top left and now you're back to the Projects view. I only have this one project here. I can tap the Name to name it and I can tap the Edit button to go back in. I could use the Play button at the bottom to simply play it now. I can use the Share button at the bottom and now I can export it. You can see I can export directly to things like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube and such if I have those apps installed. Otherwise I can hit Save Video and it will save it out as a video file to my Photos app. So you can see I've got several different options there for sizes. I can choose say 720 and it will export the movie as a 720p video. Then I have it in my Photos app and I can share it.
That's how easy it is to create a slideshow in iMovie. Now there are a ton of other apps that will also create slideshows. But iMovie is free. It's from Apple and it's pretty versatile. There's a lot of different things that you can do with it. The first time that you do it it's probably going to take a little time to get used to it. But after you make one it becomes very quick to be able to make other slideshows. The best thing is you can do it right on your iPhone while you're traveling, while you're at an event. You can take some photos, make a slideshow, and share it right from your phone.

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Make and Export a Slideshow On Your iPhone”

Karl

5 years ago

Gary, when you go to share it I didn’t see an email option. I guess you need to save to first? Also what’s the difference between Export, Save video and Save to files? Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

There is a Mail option there. You only can see the first 5 in the video, but if I scroll over it is there. Try it. Also, try those export options and you'll see the difference. For instance, Save Video saves to your Photos app library and Save to Files saves as a file into iCloud, Dropbox, or local files.

Rose

Are you able to save a slideshow to a cd or dvd with iMovie? I have albums of scanned pictures from years past which I have organized chronologically and if I try to save to a cd or dvd they are all scrambled up. Thanks.

Rose: I'm not sure what you mean. Are you looking to make a video DVD (to play in DVD players)? Or are you just looking to store the resulting video file on a CD or DVD like you would an external drive or USB Thumb drive? A slideshow is a single file, a video, so they can't get scrambled up like a set of files could. The file themselves are probably in an order (like alphabetical) not scrambled.

Gary, yes I’m looking to make a video to play on a dvd player.

Rose: In that case you can build the video in iMovie and export as a regular video file. But then you need Video DVD creation software to convert it and build a DVD that works in DVD players. There are some in the Mac App Store.

Comments Closed.

How To Make and Export a Slideshow On Your iPhone

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Make and Export a Slideshow On Your iPhone”

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