Images to video

How it works

Each image is held for the number of seconds you choose, scaled to fit your canvas and padded if the shape does not match, then joined into one video. Mixed portrait and landscape photos are handled: they are centerd on the canvas with bars rather than cropped or stretched.

Use the arrows in the file list to set the order before running. It is the play order, top to bottom.

Adding music

Make the slideshow here, then merge it with an audio track. There is no built-in soundtrack step yet.

Getting the order right before you start

The list order is the play order, and the thing that trips people up is how file pickers sort. A folder of img1.jpg to img12.jpg comes back as 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, because it is sorting text rather than numbers. Zero-padding at export time, img01.jpg through img12.jpg, fixes it for good. Otherwise use the arrows in the file list, which is quick for a dozen photos and tedious for a hundred.

Choosing a hold time

Three seconds is the default and is about right for photographs someone is actually looking at. Two seconds feels brisk and works when the images are simple. Five seconds is a long time on screen and is only worth it if there is narration over the top. Anything under half a second stops being a slideshow and becomes an animation, which is a legitimate thing to want: a time-lapse from a stack of stills is this tool at 0.2 seconds a frame or less.

The arithmetic is worth doing in advance. Forty photographs at three seconds each is a two minute video, which is longer than most people will watch. Twenty at two seconds is forty seconds, which is a social post.

Canvas, bars and mixed orientations

Everything is scaled to fit the canvas you pick and padded where the shape does not match, rather than being cropped or stretched. That is the safe default: nothing is cut off and nobody comes out the wrong shape. The cost is bars, and a set mixing portrait and landscape photographs will show them on one or the other no matter which canvas you choose.

If the bars matter more than the framing, crop the odd ones out to a consistent shape with resize image before building the video. Choose the canvas for where it is going: 1920 by 1080 for YouTube or a presentation, 1080 by 1920 for Shorts, Reels and TikTok, 1080 by 1080 for a square feed post. The background behind the bars can be black or white, and white generally looks better with photographs on a light page.

Adding sound

Build the slideshow here, then put music under it with audio to video or the editor, which can also add text over individual slides and fade between them. For a GIF rather than a video, images to GIF takes the same stack of stills.

Common questions

Further reading

Related tools