Photo slideshows

Goal: turn a gallery's photos into a music-video-style slideshow — a real video file your client can play or download, built automatically with transitions and an optional soundtrack.

Prerequisites

  • A gallery with uploaded photos — see Upload photos.
  • To let a client generate their own slideshows, turn on Allow slideshow creation for that client first — see Add, edit & delete clients. This is off by default. You (as an admin) can always generate a slideshow for any gallery regardless of this setting.

Generating a slideshow

The form is the same whether you're generating it as an admin (on the gallery's Slideshow tab) or a client is generating it themselves (on the gallery's Slideshows tab in the client portal):

  1. Time per photo — how many seconds each photo stays on screen, from 1 to 10 seconds (default 3).
  2. Transition — the effect used between photos: Fade, Dissolve, Slide (in four directions), Circle Open/Close, Pixelize, Radial, Zoom In, Smooth Left/Right, Horizontal Blur, Random (a different one each time), or None (a hard cut).
  3. Music track (optional) — pick from the available tracks, or leave — No music — selected for a silent slideshow. Click the play button next to the dropdown to preview a track before choosing it.
  4. Opening slide and Closing slide (both optional) — upload a JPEG, PNG, GIF, or WebP image to bookend the slideshow, for example a title card or a "Thank you" slide.
  5. Click Generate Slideshow.
Building the video happens in the background on the same throttled video queue used for transcoding and watermarking — it doesn't run instantly. The slideshow appears in the list below the form with a status of Queued, then Processing, then Done (or Failed if something went wrong).

Playing and downloading a finished slideshow

Once a slideshow's status is Done, its row gets Play and Download buttons. Every slideshow generated for a gallery — whether you made it or the client did — is listed for both of you, with a Created by column showing You / Your photographer from the client's side.

Behind the scenes, each finished slideshow is stored as a video in that company's Slideshows video collection, so it also benefits from normal video delivery — you can find it under Videos if you ever need to manage it there directly.

Regenerating or trying different options

There's no in-place edit — change any of the options and click Generate Slideshow again to build a new one alongside the earlier attempts. Previous slideshows for the gallery aren't deleted automatically, so clean up ones you don't want to keep.

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