Creating a super iPhoto Slideshow

With the release of iLife ’09, Apple has made creating an amazing slideshow from your digital photos easier than ever before. What used to take a couple of hours now takes less than 30 minutes, and I’m going to now walk you through how to make a 3-minute long slideshow of your own, in ten minutes or less.

There are several ways that you can start your slideshow. If you’ve been playing with the new Faces feature in iPhoto 8 (included with iLife ’09) you know how easy it is to organize your images based on subject. You can also base your slideshow on a particular Event, if all of your images happened to be taken on the same date, and are therefore organized together.

For my example, I can’t really use either of the two techniques mentioned above, as my images span the course of a two-week long vacation, and my images are not all of the same person, or subject, so I’m going to take a bit more traditional approach.

While iPhoto 8 allows you to be completely spontaneous in your creativity, and includes brand-new tools to help you get in and out rather quickly, it does help a bit if you know what you’re going for ahead of time.

My slideshow’s theme is Paris by Foot, and includes several photos I took while Pausha and I walked around the city over the course of a couple of weeks. Now, music is very important to me, and most of what I do has its own soundtrack.  And so the first thing I did, even before I selected any of my images, was to select my song.

Tip: Your slideshow can (and likely should!) have it’s own soundtrack. It’s much more enjoyable to view several dozen photos when you have a snappy tune to hum along with, and choosing the perfect song can make your presentation much more powerful, emotional, and therefore memorable for the viewer.

A little preparation: I selected a song called Le Sapin by a contemporary French singer named Charlie. To make things easier later on, I created a new Playlist in iTunes, and named it Paris by Foot. I then dragged my song into that playlist. I also noted that the song is 3:09 long, which will therefore be the approximate duration of my slideshow.

My next step was to return to iPhoto and create a new album, also named Paris by Foot. I sifted through, and chose 50 photos for my slideshow, and then dragged them into this new Album.

I entered the album by selecting it in iPhoto’s sidebar.

I then pulled the Magnification slider (on the bottom right) about 3/4 of the way to the left, to shrink my thumbnail images enough to view all 50 of my photos at the same time.

Now, my next step was to arrange them into sequence.   Some of these photos were taken in the early morning, some at high noon, some at dusk, and others in the evening.   I dragged them around inside of this album so that the morning photos appear first, then afternoon, dusk, and finally the evening photos.   This small touch creates a bit of narrative for my slideshow.   Even though my photos were not taken in the same day, this step adds the illusion of continuity, and tells a more interesting visual story.

After organizing my images, I ran some quick math.  My song is just over 3 minutes in length.  I have 50 photos, which means that each photo would be displayed for approximately 3.75 seconds, which is far too fast for a slideshow.  I’d like each image to appear on screen for at least 5 seconds, which means that I put about 12 too many images into my album.   I found it easier to remove images from the project after I had gone through the effort of arranging them in order.  I went into my album, and removed 11 images, leaving us with 39 photos. Perfect!

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Now we’re ready to get started!  Keep in mind, you don’t have to put in that degree of preparation work I’ve just described, but it does help out a bit.  There is something to say for simply diving in without a plan and being spontaneous too.

Let’s begin. Because we’ve already got an album created in iPhoto, we’re going to create our slideshow from that album, which is one of a handful of ways to create a new slideshow.

I select the Paris by Foot album, and then click on the + button at the bottom left of iPhoto.

I then select Slideshow from the resulting window, and hit Create.

You’ll notice that iPhoto rearranges itself a bit, with our first image in the viewer, and all of the images above.

You can rearrange your images in the top viewer now.   I’m already satisfied with the sequence of images, so I’m going to proceed to the next step, which is to select a Theme.

Click on the Theme button at the bottom of the viewer.   You’re now presented with 6 options:

• Classic

• Ken Burns

• Scrapbook

• Shatter

• Sliding Panels

• Snapshots

I usually go with the ol’ standby, Ken Burns effect, but it’s been done to death, and I want to try something new, so for this project, we’re going to go with Snapshots, which is really slick.

Next step, music. Click on the Music button at the bottom of the viewer.

Tip: Note that “Play music during slidehow” is selected by default. Should you ever want to create a slideshow with no soundtrack, this is where you’d control that.

We’re concerned with that “Source” menu. Because I put my song into an iTunes playlist ahead of time, I’m going to select iTunes Playlists, and then Paris by Foot, and hit Apply.

Next step, fine tuning. Click on the Settings button at the bottom of the viewer.  Notice that there are TWO buttons at the top of the Slideshow Settings menu, “All Slides,” which allows you to make adjustments which will effect the entire slideshow, and “This Slide,” which is where you can apply cool visual effects to each image individually.

Let’s start from the top here. With “All Slides” selected, we have two options governing the length of time each slide is displayed.  You can choose to “Play each slide for a minimum of X seconds.”   This options is best when you have a long slideshow which will span a few songs, and allows you to set the duration of each slide manually.  The music will repeat if necessary.

The other option is “Fit slideshow to music.” Choosing this option will force iPhoto to figure out the average duration necessary to fit your chosen music.  This is the option we’re going to use, as it makes for a more polished presentation, and we did a little bit of prep work earlier to have this option work in our favor.

Our next task is to decide whether or not we want an intro slide (basically a title card) bearing the name of our project.  If you do want a title slide, you can click on the little right arrow to edit the title text.  We do not want a title slide, so we uncheck this box.

Repeat slideshow? No. Uncheck this box too.

Aspect Ratio.  Well, let’s ask ourselves, where are people going to view this?  At the computer?  On their TV? I’m going to choose iPhone from this menu, because that’s where I show most of my photos. (Long gone are the days of carrying photo albums in your wallet.)

Now we’re done with the “All slides” menu.  Now select “This slide.”

You’ll notice that we can choose to apply black and white, sepia tone, or “antique” effects to each slide. I like the “antique” setting because it reminds me of the way that Kodachrome film dealt with colors back in the 70’s.  You can advance from slide to slide applying (or not applying) one of these three filters. I’m going to apply “antique” to most of them, just for fun.

Tip: While we’re completing this step, do keep in mind that if we come across any images which could use some additional editing, simply double-clicking on the slide in the top menu will bring that image into edit mode, where it can be cropped, effected, filtered, etc.  One has only to click the Done button at the bottom right to return to the slideshow viewer, where the updated image has replaced the old version.

If you already know (as I do) that you’d like to apply one of these filters to all photos, you don’t have to apply it one at a time.  Simply select all photos in the top viewer, and then apply the filter.  All images will be effected.

Now we’re ready to preview our slideshow!   Click on the Preview button, to see how the slideshow will look once exported.

I happen to really enjoy this Snapshots theme.  The slides overlap each other as they advance, to simulate a table covered with photos, but as the new slide moves in, the preceding slide desaturates to gray, which is a really fun effect.

Changing Themes.  Why not try out some of the other Themes while we’re at it?  Simply click on the Themes button again, and choose another theme.

You’ll note that bringing up the Settings Menu will give you new set of adjustments for your new theme.

For instance, the Ken Burns allows you to get in there and fine tune precise zoom and speed controls for each slide, if you like.  This is a bigger deal than it might sound to you. Slideshows with such detailed control over animation used to require hours of keyframing and fine tuning in Apple’s excellent, though very expensive Final Cut Pro software.  This is a huge advancement in the quality and power of consumer-level creative software!

Tip: As you try out different Themes, you’ll need to repeat the Music selection step and you’ll want to go into the Setting menu for each them to make sure you’ve got everything adjusted to your taste.

Finally, (yes we’re almost done!!) when you’ve got your Theme selected, Music is set, and all of your Settings are perfect, it’s time to Export your slideshow out so that it can be shared with friends and family, or sent to your Apple TV or burned to a DVD for viewing in the living room.   If you wish to keep this slideshow in iPhoto, and you only intend to view it there, at your computer, you’re done.

For the rest of us, click Export at the bottom right of the viewer.

Just as with iMovie, you now have the opportunity to create a single, or multiple exports of your project, each one exported to settings relevant to it’s purpose.

My intention for this project is to put it on my iPhone, and also on the web.  I’m therefore only concerned with selecting the Mobile option.

Tip: If you know what you’re doing in Quicktime, you can also choose the “Custom Export” option, but if you don’t know .wmv from a .mp4, I suggest you stay away from that button for now.

Once you click Export, you’ll have only to select the location to which iPhoto will save the slideshow file, and you’re done!   iPhoto created a new folder in my Pictures folder called iPhoto Slideshows.

My 3 minute slideshow took 3 minutes to export on my MacBook Pro.

Total time spent (including export): 11 minutes!!

Scroll down on this page to view my slideshow with each of the 6 available themes applied to them.

Now, let’s see what YOU can do with your slideshow.  Have fun!

Thanks for reading,

~ Chris.

Snapshots Theme

Ken Burns Theme

Sliding Panels Theme

Shatter Theme

Classic Theme

 

Tagged as: Digital Photography, iLife, iPhoto, Your Digital-Life