Creating Slideshows with Pic-Time is a powerful tool to create memories for your clients and share your imagery with your community. There are different factors to consider with your Slideshows, so we’ve gathered our best tips for creating the most effective Slideshows.

There are four format options to choose from, and each one is good for different purposes. 3:2 Landscape is good for most photography, 16:9 Landscape gives a cinematic feel, 4:3 Landscape shows off film images for a classic approach, and 9:16 Portrait is excellent for all mobile endeavors.

Choose a well-rounded, story-arching highlight collection of images. Avoid repetition in showing similar-looking photos, or lean into it at a particularly emotional moment by showing the entire sequence of images (such as a first look). These choices will also have a greater impact depending on other design elements you choose later on, such as the speed of your Slideshow, and song choice.

Ultimately, you don’t want to over-select images and create a Slideshow that’s too long where you lose the interest of your clients.

Our general recommendation:

For a wedding of 600 images, create a Slideshow with 50-100 images.

For a family or lifestyle session of 150 images, create a Slideshow with 35-50 images.

For a portrait session of 50 images, create a Slideshow with 15-25 images.

Use our premade layout styles, color palettes, and font collections to design a beautiful Slideshow within seconds, so you don’t have to spend time creating every single slide.

Your title and ending slides are essential. Not only will they be the first and last thing clients and guests will see, but they can relay important information and may differ depending on who is sharing the Slideshow.

For example, are you creating a Slideshow for your wedding couple to share with their friends and family? Create a Title Slide that says “Our Wedding” to make it more personable for your clients when they share.

Similarly, the end slide, especially if you or your clients will be sharing on social media, should have impactful or important information. We suggest adding your website, social handle, or other ways any prospective clients can get in contact with you.

Whether you choose to have the Slideshows available for free or for purchase will ultimately depend on your personal business model. Sell the social media Slideshow at an affordable rate, or offer it for free so you can have easy organic marketing with your clients. Sell a longer, full gallery version of the Slideshow, or make a highlights Slideshow as a product in the shop. Create one Slideshow focused on your Main Clients, and a separate one for guests of the gallery.

For desktop Slideshows, we generally suggest 3-5 minutes for the most impact with your clients. You can have multiple songs within one Slideshow, and you can edit each track so that it plays only a certain portion of the song. There is a fading transition between each song.

If creating a Slideshow for Instagram Stories or Reels, or for Tiktok, we suggest keeping the Slideshow under one minute. In addition, you may consider not including music in the Slideshow. All the music in our Music Library is licensed and can be used on any social media or site, but adding music in-app may give your Slideshow a boost in the algorithms.

When finished creating your Slideshow, you can easily duplicate it from the Photos tab into a different format. For example, if you’ve created a Desktop version, duplicate it and change the format to 9:16 Portrait for a mobile version.

Automatically adjust the layout orientation, and click Continue.

Then you can continue on to edit your Slideshow, potentially consolidating slides to keep the Slideshow under a minute long for social media, and editing the title slide depending on who you or your clients intend to share the Slideshow with. For example, the desktop version can have a general title “The Parker Family” versus the client’s social media version “Our Family Adventure”.

Tag us on Instagram! We love seeing your Slideshows and love all the different ways photographers utilize them. Be sure to tag us on Instagram @pictime_us