Image to Video Online

1. 1

   Add your photos

   Drop one or more images onto the page, or browse for them. Drag a card to reorder the deck.

2. 2

   Set the timing

   Give each slide its own duration, or set them all at once. The total length updates as you go.

3. 3

   Pick a look

   Choose a transition, turn on pan and zoom, and pick the shape you are publishing to.

4. 4

   Add music

   Attach a soundtrack and choose whether it trims, pads or loops to fit. Fades are optional.

5. 5

   Watch it first

   Scrub the preview to check the timing before you commit to a render.

6. 6

   Render and download

   Export MP4, WebM or MOV. Nothing is uploaded at any point.

A folder of photographs is something people scroll past. The same photographs given timing, motion and a piece of music become something they sit and watch to the end. That is the whole difference a slideshow makes, and it is why every social platform rewards the video version of a photo set far more generously than the photo set itself. A video autoplays in a feed, holds attention long enough to be measured, and can be posted where a gallery cannot go at all.

What a slideshow gives you that a photo album does not

• Pacing you control. You decide how long each picture holds attention, so the important shot gets six seconds and the establishing shot gets one.
• A place to publish. Reels, Shorts, TikTok and Stories accept video and nothing else. A slideshow is how a photo set gets onto them.
• Sound. Music changes how a sequence of images feels more than any visual effect does, and a photo album has nowhere to put it.
• Motion on a still. A slow push into a photograph reads as intent. A photograph held motionless reads as a stalled video.
• One file to send. A single MP4 travels through messaging apps, email and every player, where forty separate images do not.

A transition is the join between two slides, and the choice of join does more work than most people expect. A hard cut is honest and fast, and it suits a deck of related shots that are meant to read as one sequence. A crossfade blurs the boundary and makes a set of unrelated photographs feel like a single piece. Fading through black puts a beat of silence between them, which is what you want when the subject changes completely. This tool overlaps transitions into their neighbouring slides rather than adding them between, which is how editing software has always done it — so a three-second slide with a one-second crossfade still shows two full seconds of that photograph on its own, and the total length stays predictable.

The four joins, and when each one is right

• Cut. No transition at all. The fastest read, and the right default for photos taken moments apart.
• Crossfade. One picture dissolves into the next. The safest choice for a mixed set, and the one most slideshow tools offer alone.
• Fade through black. Out to black, then in from black. Use it where the subject or the location changes and you want the viewer to feel a break.
• Slide. The outgoing photo pushes off as the next arrives. Energetic, and it suits short vertical clips more than long landscape ones.

Ken Burns is the documentary maker whose films made a technique famous enough to carry his name: hold on a still photograph and move slowly across it, so the eye is led to something rather than left to find it. It is the single feature that separates a slideshow which looks made from one which looks assembled, and it costs nothing but a setting. A gentle push into a portrait draws attention to the face. A drift across a landscape reveals it the way a person's eye would. The strength control decides how far the move travels, and it is worth keeping low — a move you notice is usually a move that is too big.

Choosing a move

• Zoom in. Starts wide and closes on the centre. The most useful default, and the one to reach for on portraits and detail shots.
• Zoom out. Starts close and opens up. Good for the first slide of a deck, because it reveals the setting.
• Pan left or right. Travels sideways across the frame. Made for wide landscapes and group shots where the interest is spread horizontally.
• Pan up or down. Travels vertically. Suits tall subjects — buildings, waterfalls, full-length portraits.
• Vary. Alternates the move from slide to slide in a fixed order. A long deck with one repeated move starts to feel mechanical; varying it does not.

Two separate decisions decide what your slideshow looks like on a phone, and they are easy to confuse. The first is the shape of the video itself, which is dictated by where you are publishing. The second is what happens to a photograph that does not match that shape — and since almost every deck mixes landscape and portrait shots, that second decision applies to most slides whatever you choose. Getting the pair right is the difference between a video that fills the screen and one that sits in a small box with grey around it.

The four shapes, and where each one goes

• 16:9. YouTube, a website embed, anything watched on a laptop or a television.
• 9:16. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Stories. Full screen on a phone held upright.
• 1:1. A square feed post. Takes the same space in a timeline whichever way the phone is held.
• 4:5. An Instagram portrait post — taller than square, so it occupies more of the feed, without being a Reel.

What happens to a photo that does not match

• Letterbox. The whole photograph is kept and bars fill the rest, in a colour you choose. Nothing is lost, which matters when the composition is the point.
• Fill. The photograph is scaled until it covers the frame and the overflow is cropped. No bars, but the edges of the picture go.
• Blurred background. The photograph is kept whole, and the gap around it is filled with a soft, darkened copy of the photograph itself. This is what social apps do, and it is usually the best-looking answer for a deck that mixes orientations.

Music is not decoration on a slideshow, it is the thing that sets its pace. A soundtrack tells a viewer how fast the sequence is meant to move and when it is going to end, and a slideshow without one asks them to work that out for themselves. Attach an MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC or OGG file, and decide how it should meet the length of your deck — or work the other way round and let the deck solve itself to the length of the music, which is what the match control does. Fades matter more than they sound: a track that stops dead on the final frame is the most common way a finished slideshow gives itself away.

Making the music and the pictures agree

• Trim. The track is cut where the slideshow ends. Use it when the music is longer than the deck and you do not mind where it stops.
• Pad with silence. A short track plays once and the rest of the slideshow runs quiet. Rarely what you want, but honest about it.
• Loop. A short track repeats until the last slide. The right answer for a ten-second loop under a two-minute deck.
• Match the slideshow to the music. Instead of fitting the track to the deck, this solves every slide duration so the two end together — transitions included in the arithmetic.
• Fade in and out. A second or two at each end. It is the difference between a slideshow that ends and one that simply stops.

A video is a sequence of pictures shown quickly enough that the eye reads them as continuous, plus a timeline that says when each one appears. Turning photographs into a video therefore means deciding, for every single frame of the finished file, exactly what should be on screen at that moment — which photograph, how it is framed, how far through its camera move it is, and whether it is currently dissolving into the next one. At 30 frames per second, a two-minute slideshow is 3,600 of those decisions. The controls on this page are how you describe them, and everything after that is arithmetic.

What happens between your photos and the file

• Decode. Each photograph is read at a size matched to the output, with its orientation tag honoured so a phone photo is the way up you took it.
• Place. The picture is positioned in the frame according to the shape and the fit mode, then offset and scaled by wherever its camera move has reached.
• Blend. Inside a transition, two slides are composed together at the weight the moment calls for.
• Encode. The finished frame is handed to the encoder with its own timestamp, and the container collects them into a playable file.

A few numbers explain most of the decisions on this page, and knowing them saves a lot of trial and error. They are also why some settings interact in ways that look surprising until the reason is clear.

Numbers that decide your settings

• Frame rate is about motion, not quality. 30 frames per second is ample for a slideshow; 60 doubles the work and only pays off if your camera moves are fast.
• A transition cannot be longer than half the shortest slide, because it is spent half in each of its neighbours. The control's range tracks your durations for exactly this reason.
• Total length is the sum of your slide durations minus the overlap of every transition, so adding a crossfade to a deck makes it shorter, not longer.
• A slideshow of motionless photographs compresses to a fraction of the size of one with pan and zoom on, because a frame identical to the one before it costs the encoder almost nothing.
• Three to five seconds per photograph suits most decks. Under two feels rushed on anything with detail; over eight starts to feel like a stall unless there is a camera move.
• Vertical 9:16 at 1080p is 1080 wide by 1920 tall — more pixels than 16:9 at the same name, which is why a vertical render takes slightly longer.

Most of what separates a slideshow that holds attention from one that does not is decided before you press render. These are the choices that matter, in the order they matter.

Getting a better-looking result

• Put your strongest photograph first. A feed gives you about two seconds to earn the rest.
• Keep camera moves gentle. A move the viewer consciously notices is almost always too strong.
• Vary the direction of the moves across a long deck, or the repetition becomes the thing people notice.
• Pick one fit mode and stay with it. Switching between letterbox and fill mid-deck reads as a mistake.
• Use blurred background when your photographs mix landscape and portrait — it is the only framing that handles both without either bars or cropping.
• Let the music decide the length. Solving the slide durations to the track is faster than trimming the track to the deck, and it always lands cleanly.
• Fade the audio out. It is one control and it is the single most noticeable difference between a finished slideshow and a draft.

What people build with this

• Reels and Shorts from a photo shoot. Vertical, blurred background, a crossfade and a gentle zoom — the standard shape of a photo set on social video.
• Property and product listings. One clip walking through every photograph, in a form that can be posted rather than attached.
• Event recaps. A wedding, a conference or a trip, paced to a piece of music and delivered as one file.
• Portfolio reels. Work samples with captions, in the shape the platform wants, without opening an editor.
• Time-lapse from stills. A sequence of frames at a short duration each and no transition, which is exactly what a time-lapse is.

Everything on this page runs on your own device. Your photographs are read, composited and encoded where they already are, and the finished video is assembled there too — no file is sent anywhere at any point, which you can verify yourself in the network panel of your developer tools while a render is in progress.

Under the hood, in plain terms

• Bounded decoding. Photographs are decoded at a size matched to the output rather than at full resolution, and only a few are held at once — so a thirty-photo deck uses the same memory as a three-photo one.
• Hardware-accelerated compositing. Framing, camera moves and transitions are drawn by the graphics hardware, which is what makes a full-length preview scrub smoothly while you work.
• In the background. The whole render happens away from the page, so the interface stays responsive and the preview keeps moving while a long deck encodes.
• Verified output. The finished file is read back and checked against what was requested — its shape, its length and whether the soundtrack arrived — before it is offered to you.

Rendering happens on your device with hardware acceleration. A five-slide, fifteen-second slideshow at 1080p renders in about a second and a half on a modern laptop, and nothing is uploaded at any stage.

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