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.
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 to use forever, although there is a small watermark in the corner; you can pay a small fee to remove it.
Kapwing’s Studio accommodates all sorts of video slideshows. Everyday, more than 8000 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: 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 Motion Videos: 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 Studio
- Add Scenes
- Arrange and Design
- Add Music
- Create and Share
Step 1: Open Video Studio
Navigate to Kapwing’s home page and click “Get Started.” The 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!
Start with a blank canvas in the Studio and size it to the aspect ratio you want. Click the “Resize” button in the main toolbar to change the canvas size for Instagram (square 1:1), Story (vertical 9:16), YouTube (landscape 16:9), or a custom size.
Creators can set a custom background color with the “Background” tool.
Step 2: Add Scenes
The next step is to bring in all of the pictures, video clips, and GIFs you want in your slideshow. First, click the “Add Scene” button to insert scenes for every clip. For example, if you want to make a slideshow with 10 images, insert 10 scenes.
Then, for each scene, design the layout you want or import the media that you want to appear. With Kapwing, you can drag-and-drop, select the files from your camera roll or disk, or import media from a URL. The “Paste a link” feature is useful for grabbing videos from YouTube, GIFs from Giphy, or other files from Google Images and Google Drive.
Step 3: Arrange and Design
Once all of your videos and images have loaded, it’s time to design your slideshow. Using the Studio, design each scene as you want it to look in the output video.
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. For the images in your slideshow, click the “Timeline” tool to set the duration of the scene (make it longer or shorter). If you have some video clips in your slideshow, you can trim down the clip to a shorter section or cut out mistakes.
You can also add design elements to the layout of each slide. 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.
Step 4: Add Music
Once your slideshow is done, it’s time to add music! Click the “Audio” button 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: Create and Share
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.
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.