How to make PowerPoint Photo Slideshow

Hi, everyone. My name is Kevin. Today, I want to show you how you can set up a photo slideshow using Microsoft PowerPoint. It's pretty easy to do, and as full disclosure, before we jump into this, I work at Microsoft as a full-time employee. All right. Well, let's jump to it. I'm on my PC desktop here, and I have the latest version of PowerPoint installed. This is PowerPoint that comes with Office 365. It's the latest version of Office. If you have Office 365, if you have Office 2019, 2016, any recent version, you should be able to do this. It should go back to previous versions, but I won't guarantee that it'll work if you're on a very, very old version. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to click on Blank Presentation. I'm on the homepage of PowerPoint, and here I am. I have a nice blank canvas. How do I set up a photo slideshow? What we're going to do is we're going to go up to this Insert button on top, and you'll see this option for Photo Album, and I'm going to click on New Photo Album. Let's go ahead and click on that. What I can do here is Insert Pictures From. It looks like it wants me to click on that button, so I'm going to go ahead and click on that. What I've done is on my desktop, I have a folder for Photo Slideshow, so I'm going to go ahead and click on that. I was recently in France, and I took a whole bunch of pictures, so I'm going to bring in the pictures from my France trip. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select the first photo, and I want to bring all of these in, so I'm going to press the Shift key and then mouse on the last one, so that'll highlight all the photos that I want to bring in, and then I'll just click on Insert. What you'll see now is it brought in all the photos into this view. What I could do is I could reorder what order I want these photos to show up in. I could rotate pictures if it's the wrong orientation. It has some very basic editing functionalities. I could increase brightness, contrast, all of that, and I could also go through the photos, and I could say how I want it to show up on the slide. Here I could do Fit to Slide. I could have just one picture show up. I could have two pictures show up, or two, or four, any number of pictures that I want to have show up. Here it shows what slide, so here, if I do four on a slide, it has the one, and I know these four pictures go on that slide. I just want to have one photo per slide, so I'm going to go to Fit to Slide. You could also apply different PowerPoint themes, so these are the themes when you click on Design. You could apply any one of those themes. I'm just going to stick with the standard, and then All Pictures, Black and White Background, or I could just change the pictures to black and white, but I want to keep it in color. Once I've gone through and I have all my photos in here, then I'm just going to click on the Create button, and what that'll do now is it'll bring all my photos into PowerPoint, so let's just let it go through and create this. Here it is. It's created my photo album, and I'm going to close the Design Ideas, so it's Photo Album by Kevin Stratford, and then here you'll see all my photos are now in a slide deck. We have Notre Dame. There's the Eiffel Tower, and so a lot of the very famous French sites, some chateaus and whatnot, so a whole bunch of pictures in this slide deck. What I want to do now is, because it's a photo slideshow, I want it to automatically advance throughout the slideshow as I show it to people, and so what we could do then is I will click on Transitions, and within Transitions, you'll see something that says Advanced Slide, and so I want to maybe show the photo for about three seconds. I'm going to type in a three, and then I'm going to click on Apply to All, so let's apply this to all, and I also don't want to do it on mouse click. I just want it to go automatically, so I'll just view the slideshow to see what this looks like, so here it shows the title. Here's Notre Dame, and it'll just kind of go through the picture, so there you see it stays for about three seconds. I find that three seconds is a good amount of time to show a photo in a slideshow, and what I can also do then is I could throw in different transitions, so I'm on the Transition tab. I could have it fade between a photo. I could maybe do a wipe there, and then we could do a cut, and then maybe a shape. PowerPoint's got some fun little transitions. One of my favorite ones is the Vortex, so boom, look at that, Vortex. It's maybe a little overdone for a transition, but kind of fun, so I could apply different transitions. You get the idea of what I can do, and so let's say that I'm all good with my photo slideshow. It's going to spend three seconds on each slide. I've inserted some transitions between the slides. How do I now make it a slideshow? Well, so what I could do is I could go to File, Save As, and what we're going to save it as, so I'm going to put it on my desktop, and what's interesting is you could just save it as a standard presentation, and you have to open PowerPoint, and then you have to go into slide mode, and then it'll just kind of go through, but what you can also do is I could save it as a PowerPoint show, so let's go ahead and save it as a PowerPoint show. It's going to save it to my desktop, so when I go back to my desktop now, what'll happen is if I click on Photo Album PPSX, what it'll do is rather than opening all the PowerPoint in Chrome, the menu bars, everything else, it'll just automatically jump immediately into the slideshow, so you don't have to open the app, hit Present, so it's a lot easier to get it to start playing. What I can also do in PowerPoint, another nice way to make the presentation available is you can go to File, Save As, and once again, I'm going to go to, I'm just going to put it on my desktop, and you can also export it as an MP4, so a video file. I'm going to go ahead and save it. You'll notice that it takes a little bit of time to create the MP4 with all the images. Here you'll see that it's saving right now. Okay, the video just finished saving, and we're going to go back to the desktop, and you'll see I have this Photo Album.mp4, and so I'm going to click on that, and here you'll see that the photo slideshow just starts playing, and it'll go through photo by photo, three seconds, you'll have the transition, and as an MP4, what you can do is you can upload that anywhere. You can upload that on Facebook, you can upload that on YouTube, wherever you want to upload your photo slideshow, you can put it there, so also kind of a very easy way to create a photo slideshow. What's nice about creating an MP4 is you can also have it repeat, so let's say that, I don't know, maybe you have a doctor's office, and you want to have photos show up on the wall. As an MP4, you can just have the video play again and again on loop, so that way, I don't know, maybe you want to communicate business information, holidays, you want to show photos of your happy patients. You can do all of that with a photo slideshow and then an MP4 file. That's how easy it is to create a photo slideshow in PowerPoint. All you have to do is insert an album, set the amount of time that you want to show on each photo, and then you can either export as an MP4 or just a PowerPoint slideshow view, so either of those formats, and then you can distribute your photo slideshow, or you can show it at home on your computer, however you want to show your slideshow. Anyway, if you were able to create a really compelling, awesome photo slideshow using this tutorial, please give me a thumbs up. If you want to see more videos like this, hit that subscribe button, and if you want to see any other topics, anything else that you're trying to learn about, leave a comment down below, and I'll add it to my list of videos to make in the future, and hey, that's all I have for you today. I'll see you next time. Bye.