How to create photo slideshows on YouTube
YouTube is best know for its video hosting capabilities which have been improved a lot by Google in recent years. The site is supporting higher resolutions now for instance or making available a video editor to its users and while that is certainly basic in comparison to high end video editing tools, it makes available a set of interesting features on the site directly.
Note: YouTube's Photo Slideshows feature won't be available anymore from September 20th, 2017 on.
What many YouTube users do not know is that it is also possible to use YouTube to create photo slideshows. Most users are probably creating the slideshows in programs like Windows Movie Maker before they upload the resulting videos to YouTube. This is however no longer necessary as YouTube is supporting the creation of photo slideshows now as well.
Here is what you need to do to create a photo slideshow on YouTube.
- Open the YouTube website and click on the upload button after you have signed in to your account.
- Here you can add videos either via drag and drop, or by clicking on the button in the middle of the page.
- You find the photo slideshow option on the right. Just click on the create button here to get started.
- This opens the photo selection window. Here you can pick photos that you have already uploaded to various Google services, or use the upload photos option to add new photos from your local system.
- A preview of the photos that you have selected are then displayed as thumbnail previews on the upload page. You can rearrange them here or remove photos that you do not want to include in the slideshow.
- Once you are satisfied with the selection, scroll down to the very bottom of the page and select next there.
- The next page displays a preview of the photo slideshow in video format.
- Here you can preview the video and modify a couple of effects including the slide duration, the slide effect and the transition effect.
- You can also select an audio track here that you want played while the video is playing.
- Once you are satisfied with the selection, click on upload to upload the video to YouTube.
- This redirects you to the last page of the process where you need to add a title, description and tags to the video. Here you can also select a category for the video, and set its privacy settings.
Verdict
YouTube's photo slideshow creation feature is a great addition to the site, even though it is a bit basic in some regards. You can't add your own music to the slideshow for instance, and there is no option to add custom text to the slideshow. If you just want to create a slideshow though and do not mind that, then it is certainly an interesting option for that.
