How to make a slideshow video with photos and music

The free slideshow maker turns photos into a video in your browser. The photos stay on your device, and the video has no watermark and needs no account.

1. Add your photos and put them in the order of the story: the strongest one first, since it's what people see before they decide to stay.
2. Pick the shape: 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, square for a feed, or 16:9 for YouTube.
3. Check the timing and the motion in the preview: how long each photo stays, and the slow zoom that keeps stills alive.
4. Add a caption if the photos need words, and your music.
5. Preview it and download the video.

Need more on top? Add words at set times with add text to video, or swap or level the song with add music to video. To mix photos with video clips, make the slideshow, then join it to the clips with merge videos.

Make the video the shape of the screen it's going to. The sizes the apps recommend:

Your photos are a different shape. Phone photos are usually 4:3 (or 3:4 held upright), and a camera's are 3:2. In a 9:16 video, an upright 3:4 photo shown whole fills about 75% of the screen's height, and a sideways one only about 42%. You have three choices for each:

• Crop to fill the screen. Best for upright photos, where you lose only a little at the sides, and for photos with the subject in the middle.
• Show it whole on a blurred copy of itself. Best for group photos and landscapes, where cropping would cut people or the view off.
• Show it whole on a plain color. The cleanest look for product photos and screenshots.

Pick one look for most of the video. Our video sizes guide has every app's numbers, and the aspect ratio calculator works out a crop.

No app sets a rule; the right length is the one where people have just taken a photo in when the next arrives. As a starting point:

Change photos on the beat. At 120 beats a minute, a beat lasts 0.5 seconds, so changing every 8 beats (two bars) gives each photo 4 seconds, in time with the music. Hold the best photo longer, and the last one longest, so the end doesn't feel cut off.

Keep the whole slideshow to what the story needs. Shorts take up to 3 minutes and Reels up to 20, but a tight set of 10 to 20 photos holds people better than 60. See how long a short video should be.

The Ken Burns effect is a slow zoom or pan across a still photo, named after the documentary maker who used it. It makes a slideshow feel like video, and it steers the eye: zoom in toward a face, pan along a landscape or across a group.

• Keep it gentle: a zoom of about 5 to 10% over the photo's whole time on screen. Anything faster reads as an effect, not as a camera.
• Alternate the direction: zoom in on one, out on the next, pan left then right, so it doesn't feel mechanical.
• Start from big photos. Zooming enlarges the picture, so a small or heavily cropped photo goes soft. Most phone photos are far larger than a 1080 × 1920 frame, so they have room.

Transitions: a plain cut on the beat is the most modern look; a short crossfade (a quarter to half a second) suits sentimental slideshows. Pick one and use it throughout. Spins, wipes and page curls between every photo pull attention away from the photos.

Text: a title on the first photo that says what this is (“Our trip to Lisbon”, “5 rooms under $100”), then a short line only where a photo needs one. Keep words out of the bottom 420 pixels and the right 200 of a 1080 × 1920 frame, where TikTok, Reels and Shorts put their buttons and captions; the safe zone checker shows them. More in how to add text to a video.

Music carries a slideshow more than anything else, and it's where most get muted or claimed. Where you can get a song you're allowed to use:

Crediting the artist, using only a few seconds, or not making money from the video doesn't make a song free to use. On YouTube, a copyrighted song can bring a Content ID claim; on TikTok and Instagram, the sound can be muted. Our guide on how to add music to a video covers each app's rules and how loud music should sit under a voice.

For a video file you'll post in several apps, put a track with a license that covers all of them in the file. If you'd rather use a trending song, make the slideshow without music and add the sound in each app as you post.

You don't always need a video. TikTok and Instagram both take a set of photos with music as a post of its own:

• TikTok photo posts take up to 35 photos, with a sound, text and filters, shown as a slideshow people can swipe through.
• Instagram carousels take up to 20 photos and videos in one post. You can add a song to a carousel of photos only, not to one that has a video in it.

YouTube has no photo carousel for Shorts, so for Shorts (and to post the same thing everywhere) a video file is the way.

A slideshow needs ordinary, widely accepted settings:

Slow zooms over fine detail (leaves, fabric, hair) are hard to compress, and the apps compress again after you upload, so don't go much lower than that. The best video export settings covers each app in detail, and the video size checker tells you if a file is ready before you post.

Making slideshows out of a long video's best moments? If the “photos” you're collecting are moments from a podcast, a stream or a talk, clips will do more than stills. Clyper finds the strongest moments of a long video, cuts each on whole sentences, frames it 9:16 on whoever's talking and captions every word.