Create a photo slideshow in iMovie

Put together a movie of your images using iMovie for iOS

REQUIRES

iMovie for iOS

you will learn

How to add photos, effects, and music to an iMovie project on iOS

IT WILL TAKE

1 hour

The new Memories feature in iOS 10 enables you to create photo slideshows from images in your photo library and customize them – but it’s no substitute for creating your own photo slideshow from scratch. Of course, there’s an app for that too, which you may have on your iPhone or iPad already: iMovie.

Screen time

It’s really straightforward to pull photos from your Photo Library into iMovie and create slideshows, adding the transitions you choose, specifying exactly the music you want and even tweaking the moving Ken Burns effects so they work in exactly the way you want.

You can add a soundtrack, too – either one of iMovie’s built-in theme music tracks or a song from your own Music library. If you choose one of your own songs, it needs to be stored on your device. If you want to add some fun to your slideshow, you can choose from one of iMovie’s library of sound effects. Each effect can be applied to an individual photo. With a little creativity you could make your slideshow very entertaining!

By default, each photo in the slideshow is onscreen for four seconds, but you can easily change that – to match the length of a sound effect, for example – by tapping the photo in the timeline and dragging the yellow bar on the right edge left or right.

Once you’ve finished your slideshow, iMovie makes it very easy to share on, for example, iCloud Photo Sharing or YouTube. You can also save it on your iOS device to play later. And, if you choose that option and have an Apple TV, you can replay it on a TV using AirPlay.

The first step in our process is to create an album in the Photos app to host the photos you want to use in the slideshow. It’s not essential, but it’ll be easier later on if you do it this way – it saves having to hunt for photos when you come to import them to iMovie.