Photos for Mac sports several slideshow presentation styles called themes, which add personality to your slideshow through graphical embellishments and animations. Friends and family will declare you a computer wizard and swear you spent hours crafting the visual feast that is your slideshow when in fact all you did was click a button to pick a theme (let this be your little secret). (You don’t get to pick themes when playing a slideshow in Photos for iOS.)

You get the same set of themes with instant slideshows as you do with the saved variety. Your choices are Ken Burns, Origami, Reflections, Sliding Panels, Vintage Prints, Classic, and Magazine. Rather than reading descriptions of each theme, it’s far more fun to preview them yourself (Figure 6-1 explains how). The box on Who’s Ken Burns? has more about the Ken Burns theme.

Figure 6-1. When you kick off an instant slideshow (as shown here in Collections view), at the top of the Themes pane, Photos previews what each theme will look like applied to the first few pictures you selected. Click through the various options to find your favorite. Saved slideshows, on the other hand, include a handy Preview button you can use to test-drive a theme. You’ll learn more about that on page 163. Photos doesn’t have as many slideshow themes as iPhoto. Apple removed Snapshots, Scrapbook, and the super-cheesy Photo and Holiday Mobile themes, along with Shatter and Places. If you import a slideshow project from iPhoto that uses one of those themes, Photos automatically substitutes the Classic theme instead.

Apple understands the importance of background music, so each slideshow theme is paired with a specific theme song licensed for your slideshow-viewing pleasure. However, you’re not stuck with tunes by the likes of Randy Newman, Miles Davis, and Vince Guaraldi. Using the Music pane shown in Figure 6-2, you can access your iTunes library and pick the songs you want to use as a soundtrack.

Using your own music lets you control the mood of your show. For example, if you vacationed in Hawaii and came home with a bunch of slack-key guitar music, suck those CDs into iTunes and then use a few songs as background music. If you partake in winter holiday festivities, you can create a smart album that contains all the pictures you took in December, and then pair it with your favorite holiday tunes. The creative possibilities are endless.

Alas, the Music pane only lets you see the artists and songs in your iTunes library; you can’t see any playlists you’ve made or music you’ve handcrafted in GarageBand (Apple’s music-recording app). There are other surprising limitations, too. As of this writing, you can’t select whole albums to use as a soundtrack, and the Music pane for an instant slideshows lets you pick just one song per show. The song repeats until the slideshow ends. The Music pane for a slideshow project, on the other hand, lets you pick as many songs as you want (Creating a Saved Slideshow has details).

Figure 6-2. Left: The Music pane lets you scroll through the artists in your iTunes library. Click the magnifying-glass icon circled here to open the search field so you can enter an artist or song’s name. Click a song to select it, or preview it by pointing your cursor at it and then clicking the play button that appears (click the same button to stop the preview). Right: Choose Theme Songs from the panel’s drop-down menu to mix and match slideshow themes with their Apple-assigned theme songs (say, to play the Ken Burns theme song with the Vintage Print slideshow theme).

Oddly, there’s no way to turn off slideshow background music. If you don’t want any tunes to play, you have to mute your Mac’s audio. Bummer!

You can play an instant slideshow in Photos for iOS, too, though you don’t get to pick a theme (you get to pick a transition style instead). The process varies ever-so-slightly on iPads versus iPhones and iPod Touches, as this section explains.

Either way, to trigger an instant slideshow on your iOS device, you have to be viewing the contents of an album in Photos. So tap Albums, and then tap an album to open it. If you’re on an iPad, tap the word “Slideshow” at the program’s upper right and you see the Slideshow Options pane shown in Figure 6-4. On an iPhone or iPod Touch, you don’t see a Slideshow option. Instead, tap the first thumbnail in the album to open it (or whatever image you want to play first), and then tap the Share icon at the lower left. In the row of icons that appears at the bottom of your screen, swipe left to scroll horizontally, and then tap the Slideshow icon (it looks like a big play button) to reveal the Slideshow Options pane.

Figure 6-4. Left: The Slideshow Options pane in the iPad version of Photos for iOS lets you control what device the show plays on, its transition style, and its background music. Right: While the Music pane lets you see your entire iTunes library—playlists, artists, songs, albums, and so on—you can still only pick one song per slideshow. It’s extremely annoying.

The first section of the Slideshow Options pane lets you pick what device to play the slideshow on (it’s automatically set to iPad). If you’re on a wireless network that includes an Apple TV, it’s included in the list, too. This lets you pull off a slick stunt: You can play the slideshow on the TV connected to the Apple TV (obviously, the Apple TV and the TV itself have to be turned on for this to work). Give it a try the next time your neighbor pops over with vacation photos on their iPad; you’ll blow people’s minds when you effortlessly project a slideshow of their photos onto your big-screen TV.

The pane’s next option lets you control the type of transition Photos uses between pictures. Just tap the word “Transitions” to reveal a list of your options: Cube, Dissolve, Origami, Ripple, Wipe Across, and Wipe Down. Tap the transition style you want and Photos returns you to the Slideshow Options pane. To stick with the same transition, just tap Back at the pane’s upper left.

Unlike Photos for Mac, Photos for iOS doesn’t automatically assign background music to your slideshow. If you want a soundtrack, tap the Play Music switch (it turns green), and then tap the word “Music” that appears beneath it (see Figure 6-4, left) to access your iTunes music library (Figure 6-4, right). Use the buttons at the bottom of the resulting pane to find the song you want to play, and then tap the song to select it. Finally, tap Start Slideshow to play the show.

Here’s how to create a surprisingly sophisticated slideshow:

When you’re finished, there’s no need to save your project; Photos does that for you automatically. To exit the slideshow editor, simply click one of the view tabs at the top of the Photos window. The next time you dip into Projects view and double-click the slideshow to open it, you’ll find all your customization work fully intact. (If you only have one project, it opens automatically.)

To delete content from your slideshow, simply open it in the slideshow editor (go to Projects view and double-click the slideshow’s thumbnail), select the offending thumbnail(s) at the bottom of the window, and then press the Delete key on your keyboard. Photos won’t ask if you’re sure—it simply removes the selected items. If you change your mind, you can press ⌘-Z to undo the deletion, so long as it was the last thing you did.

If you decide to delete the entire slideshow, just pop into Projects view (or click the Back button if you’re in the slideshow editor), select the slideshow’s thumbnail, and then press the Delete key. Photos asks if you’re certain—click Cancel to keep the slideshow or Delete to send it packin’. Alternatively, you can Control-click the slideshow’s thumbnail in Projects view and choose Delete Slideshow from the shortcut menu. The same shortcut menu also lets you duplicate a slideshow, which can be handy if you want to experiment with different slideshow settings without messing up what you’ve already done.

Photos lets you put custom text on any slide you want. As you may imagine, this presents more captioning opportunities than you can shake a stick at. And if you somehow forgot to include that shot of you cavorting with Paul McCartney, you can easily add it to your slideshow project.

Both maneuvers involve the Add button at the slideshow editor’s lower right (it looks like a circled + sign and is labeled back in Figure 6-6). However, before you click this button, take a moment to select the thumbnail of the slide you want to add text to or, if you’re adding pictures, click the thumbnail you want to precede the new content. Then, click the Add button and do one of the following:

Figure 6-9. Once you open the OS X Fonts panel, you can change the text’s formatting. Click the color swatch (circled, left) to open the Colors panel shown at right. To copy a color from your image, click the eyedropper icon (circled, right), and then click a color in your image (say, this boy’s turquoise shorts). Doing so adds a classy touch to your captions and makes them feel like they’re part of the slideshow and not tacked on at the last second.

Figure 6-10. When adding content to a slideshow, point your cursor at a moment, and the words “Select Moment” appear at upper right. Click it to select all the images in that moment. The Favorites button at upper left lets you view and select items in the Favorites album. The Selected button shows the pictures you’ve picked to add to your slideshow, as well as the images that are already in it.

After spending all that time carefully crafting your saved slideshow, you’ll likely want to share it with others. Fortunately, Photos can easily export it in a popular format (.M4V, to be exact) in the size of your choice that folks can play on most any device. You can also send the slideshow over to iTunes so you can sync it onto your iOS devices.

To get the export party started, open the project in the slideshow editor, and then click Export in Photos’ toolbar; the Export pane shown in Figure 6-11 appears. Enter a filename for your soon-to-be-exported slideshow, and then use the Where menu to tell Photos where to store it on your hard drive (initially, it automatically chooses your Movies folder, which is as good a choice as any). Next, choose an option from the Format menu. Here are your choices:

The “Automatically Send to iTunes” checkbox at the bottom of the pane sends the exported movie to the Home Videos section of iTunes, which lets you sync the movie onto your iOS devices (you only see the Home Videos section after exporting a movie in this way). Likewise, the resulting video can be found in the Home Videos section of the Videos app on your iOS device.

When you get the settings just right, click Save. Photos compiles and compresses your slideshow into a movie file that anyone can play. You see a status bar along with a Cancel button that lets you bail out of the export process if you realize you want to edit the slideshow some more.

Figure 6-11. If you plan to upload the exported movie to a website, be sure to take the spaces out of the filename (the text in the Save As field). However, this isn’t necessary if you’re going to upload it to Dropbox.com in order to share with someone else—Dropbox automatically swaps in a % character for each space it encounters.

With all the fancy animation and transition styles tucked into your slideshows, the file size of exported slideshows is huge—especially if you include videos in them. The question that naturally arises is how to share these honkin’ big files with other people. The answer depends on the file’s size and how you want to send it. Here’s a roundup of your choices:

Another way to upload an exported slideshow movie to social-sharing sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr is to use QuickTime Player, Apple’s free movie-playing app that’s installed on every Mac. The box on QuickTime Player Tricks tells you how.

Hard as it is to believe, not everyone on the planet has an Internet connection, nor is every human equipped with an iOS device or Apple TV (the horror!). So what if you want to send your exported slideshow movie to, say, far-flung relatives in the piney woods of East Texas or rural Italy? The answer is to burn the movie onto a CD or DVD that you send to them via snail mail. When they get it, they can pop the disc into their computer or DVD player and enjoy your handiwork at their leisure.

When you burn an exported movie—or several, space permitting—onto a CD or DVD, you create a data disc, which is like sharing files on an USB-based flash drive. The movie(s) don’t start playing automatically when you insert the disc; you have to tell the computer or DVD player which file to play. On a Mac, simply double-click a movie file and QuickTime Player springs into action and plays the file. (On Windows-based PCs, the file may open in Windows Media Player instead, or folks can download QuickTime from https://www.apple.com/quicktime/download). On a DVD player, use the arrow keys on the DVD’s remote to navigate to the file you want to play, and then click the remote’s play button to get it started.

While Photos itself doesn’t give you a way to burn slideshow movies onto a CD or DVD, OS X does. The process is described in full step-by-step glory in Chapter 10.

To play a video in Photos, double-click the video’s thumbnail or select it and then press the spacebar. Next, point your cursor at the video preview to reveal the control bar shown in Figure 6-12. Click the play button to watch the footage at normal speed. (The play button turns into a pause button, which you can click to stop the playback.)

Figure 6-12. Use the control bar shown here to adjust the video’s volume and playhead position, which controls the part of the video you’re viewing. The Back and Forward buttons let you step through the footage frame by frame. The control bar disappears when your cursor is still for a few seconds, but you can wiggle your mouse (or touch your trackpad) to bring it back. To reposition the control bar, simply drag it to a new spot.

To play the video at a higher speed, click the gear icon and choose Show Scanning Buttons, as Figure 6-13 shows. Now when you click the Back or Forward buttons, your video increases playback speed to 2x. Keep tapping either button to increase playback speed up to a whopping 60x in either direction. You can also scrub through your video by dragging the playhead left or right.

In Photos for iOS, tap the video to open it, and then either tap the big play button that appears on top of it or the blue play button that appears at the bottom of your screen. To pause the video’s playback, tap the playing video, and then, in the toolbar that appears at the bottom of your screen, tap the blue pause button. (To start the video playing again, tap the blue play button.)

Figure 6-13. Top: Click the gear icon (circled) to open this menu. Choose Show Scanning Buttons to play your video at varying speeds. Bottom: Notice how the Back and Forward buttons change to double triangles to let you know that scanning is turned on. Click either button to increase playback speed; the more you click, the faster it goes. The tiny indicator circled here shows you the current scanning speed.

As mentioned earlier, Photos offers precious little in the way of video-editing options. But it does let you trim footage off the beginning or end of your video in order to eliminate boring bits.

To trim a video in Photos for Mac, open it and then point your cursor at it to reveal the control bar. Click the gear icon and choose Trim from the menu shown in Figure 6-13. When you do, the control bar changes to display the individual still images your video contains (if you previously moved the control bar, it also repositions itself near the bottom of the screen). Photos surrounds the stills with a yellow border and places a yellow handle at either end (see Figure 6-14, top). To isolate the part of the video you want to keep, drag the yellow handles inward to where you want the video to begin and end (see Figure 6-14, bottom).

As you can see, trimming footage from your video is a piece of cake. Your edits aren’t permanent, either; to bring back the trimmed footage at any time, just click the gear icon and choose Reset Trim.

Figure 6-14. Top: As you drag the yellow handles, a tiny time indicator displays the new duration of your video. Bottom: When the handles are in the right spot, click Trim. The play button that appears at the left of the control bar lets you preview the shortened video before you commit to trimming it.

To trim a video in Photos for iOS, tap the video’s thumbnail to open it and a control bar appears above it. If you tap and hold the control bar’s far left or right edge, the control bar sprouts a yellow border. While you’re holding down your finger, drag right or left to trim the beginning or end of your clip (respectively). Once you drag one of the trim sliders, you can lift your finger, and then tap and drag the other trim slider if need be. When you’re finished, tap Trim at the upper right and then, on the sheet that appears, tap “Save as New Clip.” If you change your mind about trimming the clip, tap Cancel.

When you capture a slow-motion video on your iOS device, you may be annoyed with the apparent lack of control over when the motion slows and speeds up again. The footage seems to start out fast, then it slows in the middle and speeds up again at the end; but that’s not really what’s happening. In the background, your iOS device captures the entire video at a high frame rate, which is what creates the illusion of slow motion. The iOS device then merely speeds up the beginning and end of the video.

Fortunately, you can use Photos for Mac or iOS to control when the action slows to a crawl and gets going again. Or, if you like, you can make the entire video play in slow motion.

As you learned in Chapter 3, Photos gathers your slow-motion videos into the Slo-Mo album so they’re easy to find. When you open a slow-motion video, you see an extra row of controls in the control bar. Figure 6-15 explains how to use them.

Figure 6-15. Using the controls labeled here, you can specify exactly when your slow-motion video slows down and speeds up again. By positioning the handles at far left and right, respectively, you can slow the whole video!

The process for adjusting slow-motion videos works exactly the same way in Photos for iOS: Just drag the sliders that appear beneath the control bar to adjust when the videos slows and speeds up. And unlike trimming a clip in Photos for Mac, you don’t have to save your edits as a new clip. In fact, you can open the video and adjust the slow-motion timing as often as you want.

In the video control bar (Figure 6-12), click the gear icon and you’ll find a couple of menu options that let you access the individual frames in your video. Here’s what the two frame-related options do:

When you’re finished editing your video, you can easily share it with others via iCloud Photo Sharing (Using iCloud Photo Sharing); send it to someone else in an email or text message; transfer it to another Mac using AirDrop; or post it on Vimeo, Facebook, or Flickr. Chapter 8 explains how to do all that. (Spoiler alert: Control-click the video thumbnail and choose Share from the shortcut menu to reveal your options. Easy-peasy!)

Exporting your movie, on the other hand, prepares it for life outside Photos. It takes a bit more effort than sharing, but exporting lets you to do things like open it in another program, post it on a website, and share it using a method other than the ones listed above (say, on a USB Flash drive). But if you only plan to use a video inside Photos—say, in a saved slideshow (Saved Slideshows)—then you don’t have to export it.

Here’s how to export videos: