Photos in, a video that moves

A slideshow looks like the simplest video there is: photos, one after another, done. It is also the format where most attempts fail, and they fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the photos. A still that sits motionless for four seconds reads as a broken video, not a slow one. A crossfade that is too long turns every transition into fog. And a portrait photo dropped into a wide frame loses the top of a head before anyone has watched a second of it. This page is about the three numbers and one motion choice that decide whether the result feels made or accidental.

What this tool makes, and what it does not

The output is a WebM video drawn on a canvas at 720p or 1080p and recorded by the browser itself. It can carry your own music: pick an audio file and it is decoded in the tab, looped or cut to the length of the video, faded out at the end and encoded into the same file as an Opus audio track. Nothing is uploaded, so the music never leaves your device either — which is also why no library of tracks is offered: that would mean either licensing or uploading, and both break the promise. The other honest limit is speed — the recording happens in real time, so a twenty-second slideshow takes about twenty seconds. Nothing is queued on a server, so the wait you get is the length of the video you asked for.

Seconds per photo is the number people get wrong

Two and a half to three and a half seconds is the readable range for a still with movement in it. Below two seconds the eye cannot finish looking, and a slideshow starts to feel like a flicker; above five seconds the frame stops being a shot and becomes a wait. For a social post, fifteen to thirty seconds in total is the useful budget: five to nine photos at three seconds each. For a listing, a menu or a venue page, longer is fine because the viewer arrived to study the pictures, and six seconds per photo lets them. Set the value once and watch the total in the tool — the number under the thumbnails updates before you render, which is cheaper than fixing it after.

Why every photo needs to move a little

A camera never holds perfectly still, and a frame that does looks like a mistake rather than a choice. The fix is the oldest trick in documentary film-making: a slow drift across a still, known as the Ken Burns effect. Here it is a fourteen percent zoom over the length of the shot — small enough that nobody names it, large enough that the frame breathes. Zoom in pulls the viewer toward the subject; zoom out opens the shot and is the better choice for landscapes and interiors; a sideways pan suits wide photos with something to travel across. The "vary per photo" setting alternates the three so a run of images does not pulse in the same direction, which is what makes a slideshow feel mechanical.

Choose the frame before you choose the photos

The frame decides what survives. Every photo is scaled to cover the whole frame and the overflow is cropped, so a 16:9 frame cuts the top and bottom of a portrait shot, and a 9:16 frame cuts the sides of a landscape. That is fine when the subject is centred and painful when it is not: a person standing at the edge of a wide photo disappears entirely in a vertical render. Pick the destination first — 16:9 for YouTube, a website header and X; 9:16 for Reels, Shorts and TikTok; 1:1 for a feed post; 4:5 for the tallest portrait post Instagram still allows — then check each thumbnail with that frame in mind. If a photo is too small to fill a 1080p frame, run it through the AI Image Upscaler first instead of letting the browser stretch it.

Crossfade, hard cut, and the rhythm between shots

A hard cut is energy: news, products, before-and-after. A crossfade is calm: travel, food, memory, anything selling a mood. The sweet spot for a crossfade is half a second; at a full second the two photos become a grey blur in the middle of every transition. Because the fades overlap, each one shortens the finished video by its own length — eight photos at three seconds with half-second crossfades run 22.5 seconds, not 24. Hard cuts keep the full length and are the right answer when the photos already share a colour palette, because then the transition is invisible either way.

What earns a rewatch

Three habits separate a slideshow people finish from one they scroll past. Keep the horizon in the same place across photos so the sequence feels shot rather than assembled. Keep the exposure close: one dark frame between two bright ones reads as an error, so lift it before you add it. And leave the edges of the frame quiet — on vertical formats the app draws its buttons over the top and bottom, which is what the safe zone checker is for. Text burned into a photo near the edge is text nobody will read.

After the video exists

The file lands as WebM, which every modern browser, YouTube and X accept, and which the tools on this site can take straight from the result panel: continue in the video size reducer to get an MP4 that Instagram and WhatsApp accept, cut it in the video cropper, turn a section into a GIF for a chat, or loop the whole thing with the loop maker. If the slideshow is really a document — a portfolio, a proposal, a scan set — the Image to PDF tool is the better container because it keeps the pages searchable. Same photos, different job.