Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Easily Make Photo Slideshows with Microsoft Photos”.
In this article tutorial, we’re gon na take a look at Microsoft’s photos tool, and this is a tool that a lot of Windows – users – unfortunately don’t know about they’re, not aware of it. They don’t use it and there’s lots of ways you can use this. You can use it to organize your photos and to look at your photos and things like that, but there’s another way to use Microsoft’s photos, and that is you can use it to create and that’s what I’m going to highlight in this particular video. Now, if you don’t have quick access to photos down here on the taskbar, you may need to search for it. The first time that you use it.
So here I just clicked in the lower left corner type here to search and I’ll just type in photos and it brings up photos trusted Microsoft, Store app, I’m gon na click on that to open it up, and it’s telling me some things that are new in Photos the first time that you open up Microsoft photos it’s going to give you probably a series of these windows that will walk through some of the basic things that you can do with Microsoft photos, and you really should take a look at those. I think there’s lots of ways to use this tool, but I’m just gon na X out of it and close it for now – and Here I am – and I only have a few photos that I’ve imported into it at this point, but you can see, I have A collection of photos you can set up albums if you’d like and do some video projects, which is what I’m gon na show. You can add. People by tagging them in photos it’ll help you to organize your photos based on the people in them, and you can also set up some folders and that’s what I’ve done. I’Ve set up a folder of pictures that anything that’s put into that folder will be synced. Will be added to my Microsoft, photos, application and I’ll be able to see it.
You can also add a second folder, so I could just click add a folder. I could browse my computer and find that other folder and then just click add this folder to pictures. I’M not going to do it at this time; instead, I’m gon na double click here on my folder full of images, and these are all images that I got for free using the Bing image search and I selected images that are free to share and use commercially. If you want to learn how I did that and how I found these free images, please watch a previous tutorial that I made called alternative to Google images using images, but anyway, that’s where I got all of the images that I’ll be using in this article. So these photos are accessible to me and viewable from within the Microsoft Photos, app that I’m using and I can click on any one of these images and when I do it gets bigger.
I can then sometimes zoom even more into the photo, and I can go back and select a different photo by clicking this arrow in the upper left. So I could pick this one. Instead, you can also rotate and you can delete there’s some editing options. If you click Edit, you can crop, add filters, effects and more. You can draw on the image and add some 3d effects and if there’s interest I’ll show you how to do all of these things in detail.
But for today what I wanted to focus on is, instead of just focusing on an individual photo and making some edits and changes to it. Look what you can do you can click on this box in the upper right corner of any image and then select other images, and you can also just hold shift. If you hold the shift key, it will select all the images in between those that you have selected okay, so I’ve selected now several images and I guess I’ll just go ahead and select all of them. So I’ve let go of shift and I’m just clicking to add the additional images.
Now that I have those all selected, I can go up to the top of the screen here and click create and notice what I can create. I could turn these into an album. An album of images that are related, they go together or even more exciting. To me, I could automatically create a video with music there’s another option for custom video with music, we’ll look at both so first I’ll select automatic video with music I’ll name. This I’ll call. This nature scenes click, OK and it’s creating a video from those selected images.
Okay, wow. I think that turned out great Microsoft photos just randomly picked a song for my video slideshow and it put in transitions it added my title in it was all automatically created. For me now, if I’m not totally happy with that, I could click remix it for me and it will adjust some things. Let’S try that it’s changing the style, the music wow.
I actually like that, even better, and so at this point I can just click export or share, or if I want to. I could also click Edit video and I could make some adjustments to that. As you can see, there’s no need to save it’s automatically being saved on this PC, so I could go through this and watch all of that. But instead, let’s just say, I want to make a few changes. Maybe reorder some of these things, but for the most part, I’m pretty happy with this automatic slideshow video that was created. Now that that’s done, I can just click export or share and remember I had that option earlier, but I chose to edit first, but now in export or share.
I just decide what size of video is this gon na be? Is it going to be small, medium or large if you want it to be high quality on big screens? Of course, large is what you’re gon na want I’m gon na stick with medium in this case, so I click there. Alright says it’s done. It saved it here is the finished exported video notice that it’s an mp4, which is a great file type, so there it is. I can now view it in File Explorer when I click that it shows me where, on my computer, that mp4 is stored, I can also click Share to social media, email or another app.
So when I click that I could add a contact and then send it to them, or I could use one of these other options here, I could upload it to YouTube. I can mail it to someone or some of these other options like using OneNote or Skype, to share the finished video. So I think this really is a wonderful, very easy and pretty much free tool that you have if you are a Windows user now I want to click this back button in the upper left corner to go back and to show you what, if I had chosen Instead of selecting everything and clicking create automatic video with music, what if I had chosen custom video with music? Well, it’s just what you would expect. It means that I will have to customize it myself.
I can name my video photos of nature, click, OK and now I’m expected to make some decisions. I can reorder things notice as soon as I did that Microsoft Photos gave me this notice. It synced to the beat we’ve changed: the timing of your photos to match the music, which is really cool.
I love that I click Next and it’s saying do you want to turn that on or off? So? If I want to, I can turn that feature on or off just here notice that can also select the particular song that I want played rather than just what’s recommended. I can also add my own music and use one of those, but I’m just gon na cancel and kind of leave it, as is for now. Another thing I can do with this custom show is: I can click on a particular image here on the storyboard and I can set the duration for that picture. You noticed, probably in my automatic slideshow that was created. The pictures were very quick to change.
Each picture was on the screen only for a second or two. If I want to change that, maybe I want the first picture to be on the screen for five seconds. I can do that. I can just click and select the amount of time that I want.
Each picture to be on the screen. I can also do some resizing notice that this particular picture has some black bars on the side. It’S because I’m shrinking it to fit, but if I prefer, I can click remove black bars, it doesn’t shrink it to fit it. Zooms in and it removes those black bars, so I could do the same thing here: resize remove black bars.
There are also some filters. If you click filter, you can do some adjustments of the tint to the color scheme. Things like that, the warmth or coldness of the image and when you’re done just click done. You can also change some of the text options. If you do have text on that image, you can change the style to whatever you need to there and you can type text. Let’S say: there’s no text by default on this image, but you want to add text.
I can just type in a mountain and choose the style that I want that looks good to me. I can put it toward the bottom toward the top at the center, wherever I want to put that, and just click done, some other edits that you can make notice that you can click here on motion to change how this image moves, while it’s being shown by Default the images zoom slightly either left or right. They zoom in or out just slightly. But if you want, you can just say none, I don’t want any movement or zooming in or out or panning or you can tell it to pan left pan right. Zoom left zoom right. All of these different options are great to be able to adjust I’ll, just click done and then. Finally, one of the newer options that we have is 3d effects. Let’S see what I can do with that with this particular photo.
If I would like to add, maybe some autumn leaves I’ll just click and drag. Those autumn leaves I’ll click done, and you probably saw that, hopefully, I’m gon na maximize the screen and try play so you can see it a little better. Okay, so those leaves are a 3d effect that I added to that particular scene just by clicking 3d effects, and you can see that there are many many 3d effects you can also search. So, let’s say I’d like some fireworks there’s some fireworks. I can just click and drag those in. I get some options here at the right and let’s try it out now notice it stopped before the firework could actually explode. Why is that? Because this image is just on the screen for one second, so I’m going to click done and I’m going to adjust the amount of time that this particular picture is shown I’ll, go here to duration and say maybe seven seconds and now, let’s try it out I’ll Maximize it and click play okay, so that looks great.
That is much better. The way the fireworks explode once they actually have time to explode, and so, as you can see, creating a custom show is not much harder really than the automatic one. You just need to make some of these changes yourself. Now it is possible to also put in your own narration, so here at the top, where it says music. If I wanted to, instead of having music, I could choose my music select, a music file and you’ll notice that it’s looking for one of these types of files. So if I record myself talking, I could upload that file and have it play to basically narrate this show, so that is a great option, especially for teachers and students. Okay, let’s say I’m done with this, and I want to share it before I do.
I might want to look into themes. You can set the themes of your show and there’s some fun themes here to choose from, and I’m gon na go just with this kind here, so I click done and I’ll just export or share, just like I did before medium sized again is what I’ll do And once that’s done, we’ll take a look at the video there. It is and I can view file and Explorer or share just like I did the other example. I’M gon na click view in file explorer, and i just want to pull that up and open it.
As if i were gon na show it to a class, you can see the quality here is really good. So I really like this Microsoft Photos app and especially the options that it has for creating your own projects. Specifically, these create custom, video with music or create automatic video with music. If this video proves to be popular enough, I’d like to make another video that shows all of the features of the Microsoft Photos app, so maybe watch for that in the future.
I hope that you found this video to be helpful if you did. Please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter to definitely do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for another video from me at least every Monday. If you’d like to support my youtube channel, please consider becoming a patron of mine through my patreon account and you’ll see links to that in the description below .