Picture Perfect V - Slideshows

Showing Off!

One of the things I love (as a smarmy Mac owner!) is when friends and relatives come over and see photos on the screen of the Mac I have in the living room. Without a doubt, I will jump into “show off” mode, and just click on the Slideshow button. Immediately the pictures will transform into a wonderful slideshow, with music from my iTunes Library. That’s enough to get most of my friends thinking about buying a Mac the next time they need to renew their computer!

But this isn’t a “How cool is Mac” article. Recently, I had to put together pictures for a friend who was leaving the country. I was given hundreds of photos, which I put into iPhoto. I was told that a DVD of the photos was needed, as a movie. Easy I thought, as you can just send your photos to iDVD to make a DVD version. But that takes a while to put together, and the end result isn’t all that great either (in my humble opinion).

Here’s what I did:

Firstly, you need to set up your slide show the way you want it to look. This is simple. Select the photos you want in the slideshow - actually it’s easy to make a new Album (using the File menu) and putting your photos in there. On the bottom of iPhoto, click on the Slideshow button, and you will be greeted with a small window:

Click the kind of effects you want on your photos. Experiment with different styles, and then press Play to see what happens.

Next, click on Music.

You should see your iTunes collection, from which you can click on a single track. You can also click on a playlist to get a number of tracks rather than one. Now click on settings:

In the settings, you can choose all manner of details, such as timings of photos, and the what information is shown on the screen. Once you have done this, you can again test it out, by pressing play. Note, that if you check the “Use Settings as Default” in the bottom left of the window, your settings will be saved for all future slideshows.

Now it’s time to make your slideshow into a movie.

go to File > Export.

In the next window select Slidewhow:

In the slideshow settings window, you have the choice of making different sized movies. Here I’ve selected them all, for the sake of showing you all that you can do all of them at once, and iPhoto will create 4 different movies for different devices. You can of course just choose one. Once you have done that, click on Export. NOTE, this can take a long time depending on how many photos you’re exporting, and also create movies of absolutely enormous sizes. I wouldn’t do more than a hundred or so photos, for the sake of the viewer who has to sit through them all if nothing else.

This is  a great way of making something novel with your photos, and can really cheer up someone’s day!