How to Make a Slideshow With Music
You don’t have to be a video editing professional to make a slideshow with music. Thanks to advances in creative technology, people can now make a slideshow with music easily for free from any device.
You don’t have to be a video editing professional to create a beautiful or informative slideshow with music. Thanks to advances in creative technology, people can now easily make a free slideshow with music 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 or search for songs within the editors' music library to pair with their slideshow. You can make a slideshow using as many pictures and videos as you like.
With Kapwing, you can skip downloading large and complex software and jump right into creating on any phone, tablet, or computer, including Chromebooks. It's free to use most tools, and each feature is beginner-friendly without compromising quality. Users can also work with others in real-time to assemble a slideshow for a group project.
Kapwing’s Studio makes it easy to create 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 the Video Editor
- Upload Photos and Videos
- Arrange and Design
- Add Music
- Publish and Share
Step 1: Open Video Studio
Navigate to Kapwing’s Video Editor and click “Start Editing.” The Video Studio helps creators combine multiple assets (photos, video clips, GIFs, audio) into a video slideshow.
From here, either click "Start with a blank canvas" if you want to use stock imagery or start adding your own media.
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 into the Studio.
You can use the "Add Media" button in the left toolbar or drag and drop files to the center. The media sidebar is where each image, video, and GIF you upload for the project will go when you create 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.
Step 3: Set the Duration for Your Images
To start editing your slideshow with the Timeline, you need to set the duration for each image.
Select your image and choose a duration from the dropdown menu in the Edit sidebar on the right. For images, the default duration is 0 seconds. Choose a duration from the preset options or set a custom length of time. Doing so will open the Timeline.
Now you can drag the next image into the timeline to add it to the slideshow. Repeat this step for all of the images you want to include.
From here, you can drag, drop, rearrange, and trim the slides for your slideshow.
Note: the duration you chose for the first image will be default applied to all subsequent images added to the Timeline. If you'd like to change that for any one image, select the image then set the new duration using the same steps as before.
Step 4: Choose the Aspect Ratio and Background
Select the Canvas behind your image to choose the output size for the background in the Canvas sidebar to the right. Use any of the preset buttons or choose a custom size. This will resize all of the slide backgrounds in your slideshow for the desired output.
You will need to resize the images separately if you want them to fill the slides. To do so, just click on the image and open the Crop tool in the Edit sidebar on the right. Select the aspect ratio that matches what you chose for the Canvas. Choose Lock Ratio then scale the image to fill the slide.
If you prefer a colored background instead of having the image fill the whole slide, you can customize that. Choose from the preset options or enter a custom hexcode to customize the background fill with a color of your choice.
Step 5: Add Transitions, Effects, and Other Design Elements
Once you have all of your images, GIFs, and videos where you want them on the Timeline, it’s time to add some fun effects! Select the section of the Timeline you'd like to edit and then click either the Effects or Transitions tools in the right sidebar.
We have over 70 Transitions to choose from, so you can spice up your slideshow as much as you like. Just click on the Transition you'd like to try out and you'll be able to see a preview of what the output will look like in the main editor.
You can also add any stickers, text, or other elements at this time. 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.
Step 6: Add Music
Once the visual part of your slideshow is done, it's time to add music! Click the "Audio" button in the left sidebar.
Under the Music tab, 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 voiceover to go with your video.
Once you import or upload a soundtrack, you can adjust the volume, change the start time relative to the video, loop the sound, or trim the audio track in the Timeline.
Step 7: Publish and Share
Once everything looks just right, click the “Export Video” button to process your video slideshow. You can share a 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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