You don’t have to be a video editing professional to tell a beautiful or informative slideshow with music. Thanks to advances in creative technology, people can now make a slideshow with music easily for free from any device.
In this article, I’ll explain how to make a video slideshow with music using a free online video editor called Kapwing. Rather than picking lame stock music from a limited library, Kapwing creators can import any song from YouTube to pair with their slideshow. You can make a slideshow using as many pictures and videos as you like.
Kapwing is a website, so you don’t have to download any software to use it. It works on any phone, tablet, or computer, including Chromebooks. Creators don’t have to pay or even create an account to use the tools, and it’s simple enough for anyone to use. It's free and collaborative, so you can work with a team or group to assemble the slideshow if you want to.
Kapwing’s Video Makers accommodates all sorts of video slideshows. Everyday, more than 40,000 creators use it to edit videos and images like:
- Text Slideshows: Append together a series of quotes or text blocks to tell a story. Add animations to the text or skip the transitions for a straightforward storyline.
- Birthday Montages: Put your favorite photos into a video slideshow to share with someone and celebrate a special event, like a birthday, anniversary, wedding, or holiday. You could make a Mother’s Day montage, for example.
- Educational Videos: Create entertaining multimedia materials to help your class study for an exam, illustrate a historical event, teach digital media skills, or demonstrate a process.
- Travel Montage: Share your most recent vacation with friends and family by merging the pictures with background music.
- Stop Motions: Combine photos together into a high-tempo video using white board animation, legos, claymation, sketching, or any stop motion technique.
- Baby book slideshow: Show how a baby has grown in their first year of life with a digital baby book. Combine all of the home videos and best photos from their first year into a video montage.
This tutorial will show you how to make a slideshow with music in five steps:
- Open Video Maker
- Upload Photos and Videos
- Arrange and Design
- Add Music
- Publish and Share
Step 1: Open Video Studio
Navigate to Kapwing’s Video Maker and click “Get Started.” This Video Studio helps creators combine multiple scenes (photos, video clips, GIFs) into a video slideshow. You can check out a demo of it on the home page!
In the left hand panel, you see the preview of your slideshow. Notice that the Studio starts with a blank canvas and prompts you to upload media to get started.
Size: Creators can choose any aspect ratio they want for their slideshow. Use the preset buttons to change the canvas size for Instagram (square 1:1), Story (vertical 9:16), YouTube (landscape 16:9), or a custom size. This will resize all of the scenes in your slideshow so that the outputs looks as desired.
Color: Creators can set a custom background color with the “Background” tool. Choose from the preset options or enter a custom hexcode to customize the background fill.
Step 2: Upload Photos (and Video Clips)
The next step is to bring in all of the pictures, video clips, and GIFs you want in your slideshow. If you're using a computer, drag all of the image files into the Upload box. Or, select them from your file system one by one. On a phone or tablet, you can upload photos and videos from your camera roll.
Kapwing supports all popular file types: .PNG, .JPG, .GIF, .MP4, and more.
Once all of the photos are upload, click the play button to preview your slideshow. You can drag the scenes to rearrange the slideshow, duplicate scenes, and delete or replace scenes.
Step 3: Arrange and Design
Once all of your videos and images have loaded, it’s time to design your slideshow. The Studio shows you a preview of what your output will look like. Rearrange the scenes, or duplicate and delete the ones you don’t want. If you have some video clips in your slideshow, you can trim down the clip to a shorter section or cut out mistakes.
Speed: To make the slideshow go faster or slower, click the "Edit duration" button on one of the photos. Use the dropdown options to adjust the duration of each image. Make the photos last longer if you want the slideshow to go slower and shorter if you want the slideshow to go faster.
Crop vs No Crop: By default, the pictures and videos you upload are cropped to fit into the output area. But you can change this setting by clicking the "Fit with border" button in the video options panel. When you fit with border, padding appears around each one of your clips to avoid cropping them in the final slideshow.
Step 4: Add Music
Once your slideshow is done, it's time to add music! Click the "Edit in Studio" button underneath the slideshow preview.
Then, find the "Audio" tool with the music note icon in the main toolbar.
In the Add Music space, you can upload an MP3 file or import a song directly from YouTube by pasting the URL. If you’re using Chrome or Firefox, you can also record a voice narrative to go with your video.
Once you import or upload a soundtrack, you can adjust the volume of the video or the music, change the start time relative to the video, loop the sound, or trim the audio track down to a certain section. When you click “Done”, you can preview the whole video with audio added.
Step 5: Publish and Share
Back in the Studio, you can also add design elements to the layout of each scene. For example, you can put a watermark in the corner of your video, add text annotations or titles, make collages with multiple clips, or position stickers and shapes on the canvas. Use the sliders in the corner of each layer to size and position it or make a picture collage.
Once the video preview looks right, click the “Publish” button to process your video slideshow. Kapwing will burn all of your scenes together into one cohesive MP4 on remote servers, so it won’t heat up your computer. You can share the URL to the montage or download it to publish it on social media. YouTubers, meme makers, brand managers, and popular Instagrammers use Kapwing every day to power their social content.
Made a mistake? Since Kapwing is based fully in the cloud, you can always go back to edit your slideshow video. Just click the "Edit" button.
If it's your first time using Kapwing, the slideshow will have a small watermark in the bottom right corner. Sign in to remove the watermark for free and save the slideshow to a Kapwing Workspace so that you can edit and download it later.
Thanks for reading! I hope that this article has helped you make an awesome video slideshow online. Kapwing is a startup, and we’re improving it everyday, so let us know if you have ideas to make it better.
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