Slideshow Maker

How to make a photo slideshow

1. Add the photos. Tap Choose photos or drop them on the box, up to 200 at once or in several goes. Phone photos are turned the right way up from their camera orientation; a GIF uses its first frame.
2. Put them in order. Sort by date taken reads each JPEG's EXIF date (the moment the camera took it), oldest first. Photos without one go to the end, ordered by their file date. Then drag rows, or use ↑ and ↓, for the final order. Shuffle mixes them at random.
3. Set the time. 3 seconds a photo is the default; anything from 1 to 15 works, for all photos at once or for one photo in its row. Give the group photo 6 seconds and a quick run of snapshots 2.
4. Pick the transition and shape. Cut jumps, Crossfade blends over 0.3 to 2 seconds, Slow zoom drifts each photo in or out while it fades. Choose 16:9 for a screen, 9:16 for a phone story, 1:1 or 4:5 for a feed.
5. Add words, if you like. Under Words, type a title and an optional second line (names and years, say) for a title card of 2 to 8 seconds before the first photo, on a plain colour or over the first photo blurred. Type a caption in any photo's row, or tick Show the date taken to print each photo's EXIF date, written the way your browser's language writes dates (25 December 2023, or December 25, 2023). Add one or two lines for an end card. Pick Geist or Handwriting (Caveat), small, medium or large, white or dark text.
6. Add music, if you like. Add a song takes one MP3, M4A, WAV or OGG file and shows its length. Set Start at to skip an intro, a fade in (0 to 3 s), a fade out (0 to 5 s, 2 by default) and the volume. Fit photos to the song gives every photo the same time so the two end together.
7. Preview, then save. Play it, or drag the scrubber to any moment. Save MP4 shows the length and an upper size estimate first, then a progress bar with Cancel, and downloads slideshow-1920x1080.mp4.

What it cannot do

• No HEIC. iPhone HEIC photos are refused with a note; save them as JPEG first (on an iPhone, Camera › Formats › Most Compatible takes JPEGs from then on).
• Photos only. Video clips cannot be slides.
• No templates, stickers or effects beyond the three transitions: Cut, Crossfade and Slow zoom.
• At most 200 photos and 10 minutes. Over 10 minutes, Save is switched off until the slideshow is shorter.
• Date taken comes from JPEG EXIF only. PNG, WebP and GIF files, and photos whose date was stripped (many messaging apps do this), sort to the end by file date.
• One song per slideshow. No playlist, no second track and no voice-over.
• No music library. You bring the song file, and you are responsible for having the right to use it.
• No beat-matching. Photos change on their own times, not on the song's beats; Fit photos to the song only makes the lengths match.
• Words only fade. A title or end card's words fade in and out over half a second; there are no moving, typing or bouncing text effects, and captions appear and change with their photo.
• No templates with pictures or ornaments. The cards are a plain colour or the photo blurred, with your words on them, in one of two faces: Geist or Caveat (handwriting).
• Short words. A caption is at most 120 characters and two lines (longer text is cut with …); a title or card line is at most 80 characters and three lines.
• Right-to-left text uses the browser's own layout. Arabic and Hebrew lines are set right to left and shaped by your browser, in its own Arabic or Hebrew font (Geist and Caveat have Latin letters only), and a line that mixes scripts follows the browser's bidi ordering. We checked one Hebrew caption and one Arabic title in Chrome: both run right to left, the Arabic letters joined, with the numbers in a Hebrew line placed by the browser. A device without an Arabic or Hebrew font shows empty boxes.
• The date taken is the day only, from JPEG EXIF; there is no time of day and no place name, and PNG, WebP and GIF files have no date to show.
• Encoding takes time. On our 4-core test machine a 1920 × 1080 Slow zoom encoded at 0.8× real time (a 3-minute video takes nearly 4 minutes), Crossfade at 1.2× and Cut at 5.1×. A phone can be slower. 1280 × 720 is about twice as fast. The WebM fallback (browsers without VideoEncoder) always runs in real time.
• Nothing is saved for later. Close the tab and the photos, order and settings are gone.

How long will it be?

With Cut, the length is simply photos × seconds. With a crossfade, each photo starts appearing while the one before it is still fading out, so every join saves the crossfade length: length = photos × seconds − (photos − 1) × crossfade.

The crossfade is never longer than half of the shortest photo's time, so a 1-second photo gets at most a 0.5-second blend on each side.

A title card, captions and an end card

The title card plays first and pushes every photo later by its length, and the end card plays after the last photo has gone, so each one adds exactly its seconds: 3 photos at 2 s with Cut are 6 s; with a 3-second title card and a 2-second end card they are 11 s, and photo 1 now starts at 0:03.0. Cards change to and from the photos with a cut while their words fade, so a crossfade setting does not shorten them. For a memorial, a name on the first line and the years (1938 – 2026) on the second is the usual title; for a Christmas slideshow, the family name and the year, and a line like Merry Christmas from all of us at the end.

Captions sit across the top or bottom on a band that darkens the photo behind white text (or lightens it behind dark text), feathered at its inner edge, so they read over snow, sky or a dark room. Show the date taken fills every photo without its own caption with the EXIF date the camera wrote, formatted by Intl.DateTimeFormat in your browser's language: an English (US) browser writes December 25, 2023, a Danish one 25. december 2023. A caption you type always wins over the date. Sizes are set against the frame's shorter side, so a medium caption is about 56 px tall in a 1920 × 1080 video and stays the same share of the picture in a 9:16 story.

Fitting the photos to a song

Fit photos to the song turns the length formula round: it takes the song's length from your Start at point and gives every photo the same time so the slideshow lasts exactly that long. With Cut that is simply song ÷ photos: 4 photos and a 10-second song give 2.5 s each. With a crossfade each join overlaps, so each photo gets a little more: 4 photos, a 10-second song and a 1-second crossfade give (10 + 3 × 1) ÷ 4 = 3.25 s each. Times are rounded down to the hundredth of a second, so the pictures never outlast the music.

Photos stay between 1 and 15 seconds, so a fit is not always possible, and the page says so: a 3-minute song needs at least 12 photos at 15 s with Cut (180 ÷ 15), and with Cut, 40 photos cannot fit a 30-second song (40 × 1 s is already 40 s). Without a fit, a longer song is cut at the slideshow's end and fades out over the fade-out time; a shorter song either stops (fading out over its own last seconds, then silence) or repeats from the start point, with no blend at the join.

Which sound the MP4 gets

The sound is mixed by this page at 48 kHz stereo and encoded by the browser's own AudioEncoder, about 128 kbit/s. Where the browser can encode AAC (the sound in almost every MP4) it writes AAC, which phones, TVs and computers generally play. Where it cannot (headless Chrome on our Linux test machine, for one), it writes Opus inside the MP4, and the save message says so. Opus in an MP4 plays in Chrome, Edge and Firefox, but Safari on a Mac, iPhone or iPad does not play it: Safari reads Opus only from CAF files and, from Safari 17.4, WebM files. If the video is for an Apple device, make it in a browser that writes AAC, or check it plays there first. The WebM fallback (browsers without VideoEncoder) always carries Opus.

Questions

How do I make a slideshow from photos for free, without a watermark?

Open this page, tap Choose photos and pick up to 200 pictures. Put them in order (drag, or Sort by date taken), choose how long each one shows and how they change, then Save MP4. The video is made by your own browser, so there is no watermark, no logo, no account and no upload.

How do I make a photo slideshow with music?

Add the photos, then tap Add a song and pick an MP3, M4A, WAV or OGG file you have the right to use. Set where the song starts, a fade in and a fade out (2 s by default), and tap Fit photos to the song to give every photo the same time so the slideshow ends with the music: 4 photos and a 10-second song with Cut give 2.5 s each. Save MP4 writes the sound as AAC where the browser can, otherwise as Opus, and says which.

How many photos do I need for a 3-minute slideshow?

At 4 seconds a photo with a 1-second crossfade, each photo after the first adds 3 seconds: 60 photos make 60 × 4 − 59 × 1 = 181 seconds, just over 3 minutes. With Cut there is no overlap, so 60 photos at 3 seconds are exactly 3:00.

Which shape should a slideshow video be?

Wide 16:9 (1920 × 1080) for a TV, laptop or projector, for example at a memorial or a party. Story 9:16 (1080 × 1920) for a phone held upright. Square 1:1 or portrait 4:5 for photo feeds. Photos of another shape are either cropped to fill the frame (pause and tap the preview to choose what stays) or fitted whole on a blurred copy of themselves or a plain colour.

How long does it take to make the video?

Measured on our test machine (headless Chrome on a 4-core server, software H.264, ten 12-megapixel JPEGs at 3 s each): at 1920 × 1080, Cut encoded at 5.1× real time, Crossfade at 1.2× and Slow zoom at 0.8×, so a 3-minute slow-zoom video takes nearly 4 minutes. At 1280 × 720, Crossfade ran at 2.6×. Cut is fastest because a photo that is not moving is drawn once and repeated. The progress bar shows the speed on your own device as it works, and a phone can be slower. Where the browser has no VideoEncoder, the WebM fallback always takes exactly as long as the video.