The following tutorial is a step by step guide to create a photo slideshow with Microsoft PowerPoint. Putting photographs together and automating it with music in the background. Click the link below to watch the full step by step tutorial. A transcript of the video van be found below

So just a quick video tutorial to show how to make a photo slideshow in PowerPoint. This is one of the photo slideshows you may see at a birthday party or anything like that where photographs going in the background and music playing as well so we just have a presentation open here Microsoft PowerPoint is open just as if you were going to do a normal presentation and what we do is we go to the insert tab up at the very top and then give the option here for photo album and if you click on photo album go to new photo album and it will just start for you so it asked you know where do you want to take them from.

Now before I got started I got all the photographs ready in a folder on my desktop, so that’s good practice, rather than having the go now at this stage looking for them, if you could have them already previously together in an album or in a folder even that you can just go and drop them straight in its going to leave it a lot easier for you. So I have photographs here, they are copyright free photographs that I just downloaded from the internet. So we always start with these dialog boxes from the top left down to the bottom right so the finish button at all is be done at our bottom right corner, so the first button here we have is we click on file or disc so this is asking us where do we want to take the photographs from. I have stored them to my desktop so we’re going to go to our desktop on the left hand side here and here we have a folder called holiday pictures so I just dragged and dropped the photographs straight into that folder. They are just random photographs from the internet, I click on insert and I can see the photographs here now I can select them one by one and put them in, but the quickest way to do it is if you know that you’re going to use all of them in your presentation you can delete them later if you want click on the first one press ctrl + A and that will select all and then we just insert them and it will put them all in it’ll take a couple of seconds there and you can see I have 24 photographs in there so these are just random photographs you could have them all named whatever you wanted right the way through but I just have the them photographs in there okay now if you take them all these are all taken by different cameras and different sizes so there may be different, slightly different sizes. If you’re taking them all with the one camera or your phone, they would all be the exact same size and dimensions and all that. okay so that’s our photographs in now we’re not going to play about too much with the order of them because they’re all just gone in with whatever they are named. If you wanted to change the order of them, so say for example this one of the beach you can see the small preview of the water if you wanted to you could change the order up or down by clicking on the arrows here and you can also remove a photograph by clicking on it so that’s what the these arrows are for down along here you can remove photographs from it or you can change the order that the photographs appear something you may want to do if you are putting him into an album you could save them with numbers at the beginning 1 2 3 4 and they would go in and add order that might save you some time at the end. This option here for a text box if we click it you’ll see it’ll put the text box in so it’ll put a picture in and then it’ll put a text box on another slide if you wanted to say something about um maybe something that happened out there you could put in a bit of text with us so it show photographs and a bit of text and then a photograph. I’m going to leave the text box out of it for the time being give the options here we have then is we have all pictures black and white so if you wanted the presentation to be black and white you just click that box and it will show all the pictures here in black and white for you I’m going to leave that off we have colour pictures there so clicking on the pictures again just to make sure that are highlighted with different editing options here over on the left on the right hand side here so you can see you can quickly rotate then or right if the photograph was maybe landscape or portrait. You can brighten or darken and you can set the contrast up or down so we added that you may want to do no it is quite hard to do there you can see they’re quite small so ideally you’d want to have your photographs already beforehand before you do this these options here or give you the options for your pictures what we are going to lay out on the slide do you want them to fit to the slide do you want one picture power slide two pictures power slide for pictures power slide or and there’s other options with titles I tend to go with fit the slide because that’s going to fill the full screen for you we don’t worry about frame shape when I’m going to put on it and these themes we could add a theme and the way we are the theme is we just browse and pick one of these themes it’s not really going to affect us because our pictures are going to be following slides we’re not going to see the theme in the background if you were doing something like two pictures to a slide or three pictures to a slide or four I would say yeah go ahead and put one of them themes on and it’s as easy as just picking one of them and selecting and it puts it a theme on in the background there as I said we are not going to see it cuz our photographs are going to be full screen so that’s it we’ve all our photographs and you can see how quick it was because I had all the photographs in the folder previously and I’m going to go to create down at the bottom corner here so I’ll just click on create it’ll take a couple of seconds obviously depending on the amount of photographs that you have it will take slightly longer but to go straight in here it did actually put the tax box in here for me so you can see it has the text box in here we have to write the way through here we’ve a photo album and if we were to play the slideshow now so if I go to slideshow and play from beginning it will start the slideshow here we’re going to remove that first one here you can see that theme on the down I would put that proper background on it if I hit the return key it’s going to go through the photographs there right the way of through showing you all them. So I’m just pressing the enter key and the button on the keyboard like you would with any other presentation you have but that’s not going to be much fun if you’re at a party and you have to sit and press the button, so what we want to do now is…you want to try and automate this a wee bit so that it will run by itself so the first thing you want to do I’m going to take these text boxes out I’ll just show you how to Enter text in a text box if we click on word sales on the text box here we could enter any text that we want I’m going to put in just a bit of random text just so that you can see exactly the way the text would go in so if I run my presentation now just from the beginning you’ll have picture one picture two picture tree and then you’d have a bit of text about whatever about the holiday or whatever happened so that’s the way your text box works. I’m going to take the text box out I’m going to click on the left hand side just over on the left hand side where your slides are here click on it I can either press the backspace key or I could right click and delete the slide I’m going to also delete this first photo album here so this main first heading because I want it to be just a picture slideshow I don’t want this photo with the title on it so I’m going to right click and I’m going to go to delete slide so you can see there’s two ways of deleting a slide straight away. okay so we have 23 slides in here we have another one in here it picked up my photographs from the album pictures what we’re going to do is we’re going to make them now have a better movement for themselves what pictures I find if you’re doing it on the if you’re doing a photo slideshow 6 or 7 seconds is long enough for a picture to appear on the screen obviously the content of the picture will depend a lot on the amount of time you leave it up like that type for picture there you’re not going to want to stare at it for 10 or 15 seconds whereas maybe it was a picture like that one you might spend a bit longer looking at it so depending what you do we’re going to do them all just straight forward 7 seconds but you may want to change or alter them later on so we can have a look at it here so what we want to do is we want to click into the transitions tab at the top ok now at the minute over at the right hand side here you can see in the advance slide section on mouse click is selected so what that means is it’s waiting for me to click the mouse or click the keyboard until it scientist to the next late so what we do is we just click that button off and we see after so we’re you’re telling us don’t go on mouse click go after and put it up to seven seconds so that means that the picture will rest on the screen for seven seconds and then it will move on the most important thing now is we click a play to all and what that does is it applies seven seconds to every picture in the presentation now if you did want to be more accurate with your timings you could individually do each one so you just click into each one and you would need to click the apply to all then but it is a loan process because if we’re going to go to slideshow and we’re going to go to the front beginning and I’m just going to leave my hand off the mouse so we’re going to wait the 7 seconds there and once it gets to the 7 seconds it’s going to go to the next light so you can see it’s gone from one to the other and your slideshow would go right the way through after seven seconds it would go I’m going to press the Escape key no to get back to my presentation view yup and what I’m going to do now is you can see that when it’s running up on the slideshow it’s a bit choppy so one picture is there and then the next one comes in and then the next one comes in after seven seconds there’s no kind of fluidness to it so what we want to do is we want to go to transitions again and we want to maybe try and fade them in or you could split them in or reveal so something like that and what that does is it just gives them that wee bit more calmness a wee bit of fluid when you’re putting a transition into these transitions across the top try to make sure that you use maybe one of these subtle ones you don’t want to make one of these I’m going to show you one of them what they look like so the ground or schoolish though they’re okay dissolve might work either something like that but if you go to one like that that’s just revealing it means that it’s not too sort of people don’t really realize that it’s even happening whereas if it’s clock or shape or cracking or something like one of these ones that you have down here it’s nearly a joke or anything so reveal is a nice one then so we click on reveal and we click apply to all and that applies it to all the slides in the presentation the same as earlier so now if we go to slideshow and from beginning if you have a keyboard day you can press f5 and it’s harder with the laptops so you’ll see now when we get the seven seconds it’s going to change photograph but it’s going to be a wee bit more subtle about changing it so it’s going to do from one to the other goes in from one till you can see that theme in the background they are moving in okay honest goes right the way and shows you the photograph okay no okay the next thing we want to do now is we have a presentation or slideshow or a photo slideshow that it is running by itself so when we start us it’s going to run through 20 pictures or 22 pictures at 7 seconds each but what happens is then it’s going to get to the end and it’s going to stop so you’re only going to have maybe two or three minutes or four minutes whatever it is and then that’s your slideshow aren’t finished so what we want to do is we want to set it that it will continuously loop they we’ve only 20 pictures so if you stood in front of it for five minutes you would see all 20 pictures but if you had a hundred or 200 pictures you wouldn’t have that thing where people are going to see the pictures they would just keep looping in the background so the way we do this is then we go to slideshow and we go to set up slideshow so once we click on set up slideshow there’s an option here for loop continuously until escape we click it and then okay so once we do that it’s going to go 1 2 3 4 5 6 right up to number 22 and then when it gets to number 22 it’s going to go 1 2 3 I press the Escape key so if I run my slideshow no I’m not going to make you sit and watch through it the whole way it would start there that’s picture one then it would go on to picture two and then picture three and four and five and it would keep doing that over and over again until I press the Escape key on the keyboard and then it stops and it goes back to normal so you have to manually stop it now so that’s it kind of automated now it’s walking for us the way we want it the next thing we want to do is we want to add some music to it now for this I always put it on the first slide it doesn’t particularly matter which slide that you want to put it on but we put it on the first slide and the way we do it is we go to insert and I’m going to put an audio clip so over on the right hand side of the ribbon here we have audio now for this I’ve downloaded a bit of copyright free music I need to be very careful the music that I use because and what copyright issues on YouTube so if I go to audio on my PC and I have saved the file to my desktop so we’ve the file on our desktop here and I go to insert so that’s just it’s a nice calming sound that there’s nothing much in it okay so here we have if we want we could play the song you may hear that there in the background you may or not but it is playing so that song is playing there you can see I think it’s about three minutes long okay so the next thing that we want to do is we want to go ahead and we want to have a look at the settings for the music so the first thing that we have here is we have the audio tools that comes up and it only comes up when we click on the audio you can see that we audio icon there I can move that down to the bottom corner we’re going to get rid of it in a minute anyway so it’s not going to make any difference where it’s placed so we have the playback options here when we click on the music the first one we want to make sure is selected is loop until stopped so what that means is the music stream L is long if you’ve we have already put a setting in place that the sly always going to keep looping and keep going so we want to make sure that there’s music there now unfortunately you can only put the one song on us but what you could do is you could there’s programs you can get audacity is one of them and what that let you do is it let you add multiple tracks into one so it’ll allow you to take maybe five or six or seven songs and join them into one song and create one song with them now you can do that you might not be that worried about copyright but I have to be careful here okay so that’s the first thing that we do the next thing that we do is play across all slides make sure the dad is selected too because we want to make sure that it automatically players when the mute when the slide goes onto slide two and three and four we don’t want to stop whenever slide one’s gone and the next thing that we want to do is we can say hide during show make sure that’s ticked because when we play the slide show so if I go to slide show and from beginning we don’t want to see the icon I’ll show you in a second what it would look like if he didn’t have that clicked so if I take that high during show off and now if I play my slide show you’ll see you’ll have can you see it here the way music icon there is in the background okay so you need to just make sure that you have that TechEd any older versions they won’t be ticked by default okay the next thing we can do and you may need to do this on older versions is add some animation to your music that it automatically starts okay so it is selected to automatically start here but if we go to animations here there’s an option for play you can see play is selected on mine so that means that it’s going to play what you may need to do is you may need to go in and set it at an automatically player so you can add the animator into play and in the options over here on the right-hand side you can see what the previous are after previous and what that will do is it will start it with the animation that it’s it’s using them so that’s it playing now and what we do is we go to slideshow and then we go to from beginning the slideshow is playing there and you can see you may not be able to hear the music there the music will be playing in the background what and what we want to do now is you want to package it up for the final thing so we don’t want to save it as a presentation because if we save it as a presentation we have the automatically go and started up by doing what I was doing going slideshow and from beginning so what we can do is when we go to file and save as instead of saving it as a presentation so I’m just going to save it to my desktop instead of saving it as a presentation what I’m going to do is I’m going to save it as a PowerPoint show and once I save it as a PowerPoint show it takes all the editing features out of that version it’s kind of like what a PDF is to Microsoft Word so I go to save I’m going to save it as maybe my holidays and I’m going to say save so it’s going to take a couple of seconds there to save us when I go back to my desktop so down the very bottom right hand corner you have your show desktop button we have a PowerPoint show here and you can see it was created there if I double click it it automatically starts up into the presentation the music’s playing through the background there and it will go through right through your presentation for you and it will keep looping and keep going on till someone presses the Escape key on the keyboard the other option that you could do is you could package it for a DVD so if we go to file up the top left hand corner down in the very bottom you’ll see here we have an option for export and once we go to export here you can see you can create a video or you can package for a CD create a video you can do the default settings here we can click on create video default settings just mean you don’t need to change any settings so click on create video I’m going to call it my holidays I’ll put it on my desktop and I click on save so what’s creating it down at the bottom corner here you can see are in the bottom middle it’s creating it there now so it might take a couple of minutes for it to create that one is going to take quite a bit of time so what I’ll do is I’ll speed it up later on and let you see the finished video then whenever it’s done okay so the video has finished producing down at the bottom here it probably took maybe 10 or 15 minutes there 10 minutes to do if I go back to my desktop you can see here we have a an mp4 file and you can see it has a video of it I’m just going to play with VLC and it will have it here in the background so you can see it’s just video there straight out right the way through obviously with the video you don’t get the infinite Lent because we couldn’t do that with a video so this video has the 3 minutes 50 seconds so that was the length of time it took to do a video it’s ok doing a presentation or a spreadsheet or presentation out that’s going to keep looping but obviously you can’t get a video to loop or you wouldn’t have it so you can see the way that video goes in the background if I put a full screen for you just so that you can see it and so as you can see it you’ll see it’s the exact same as the way that we have us okay so you’ll see it’ll go in in the background there so there’s the video it’ll play away just the same shows your pictures you can see the advantage if you had all the pictures the exact same size so the pictures would all look the same words they wouldn’t have them white bars down along the left-hand side on right hand side so you would just make sure that each of the videos harder okay so that’s the video if you like the video and if you enjoyed it please do subscribe to the channel and you’ll get notifications whenever any new videos are updated so thanks for watching I’ll see you again soon