A slideshow is a great way to show off a set of family photos, but it’s even better when you can add some bells and whistles to make it an upscale slideshow!

I’ll demonstrate using the free Adobe Spark app on my computer. Adobe Spark also has an iPhone app and an Android beta app if you prefer to use your mobile devices, but in this video we’ll use the desktop version.

Either log in to your account or create a free account. Then click on the + mark at the top to start a new project. Scroll down and choose one of the pre-designed video options…or you can start from scratch by clicking on “Create a video.”

You’re invited to create a title, and my title is Best Buddies. Click Next and then you can pick from several video options…any of these would probably work…or you can choose “Start from scratch.” And it takes just a moment to load the video.

The first time you do this you’ll get a dialog box with a short movie you can watch that gives you some tips. Go ahead and watch it and then click “OK, I’m ready!”

And if you don’t want this dialog box to pop up each time you create a video, check “Don’t show this tutorial again,” and then click “OK, I’m ready!”

Let’s start by creating a simple slideshow because sometimes that’s all you’ll want to do. Gather copies of your photos for the slideshow ahead of time, and I even renamed mine so they would fall in order.

Under the video area you’ll see the thumbnails for the individual photos. Right now we have one active thumbnail and two more thumbnails, one for the Credits and one for the Outro which will have the Adobe Spark logo on it unless you have a paid subscription to Adobe products, but that’s a small price to pay for using this app totally free.

When you want to add more photo thumbnails, click on the thumbnail with the plus mark. Click on the circle with dots on a thumbnail to get more options. Click on the thumbnail to close the options.

To add a photo click on the plus mark on the video preview and click on the photo icon. You have various options on the right to choose from, but I’m going to click on “Upload Photo.”

Navigate to the folder with your photos and select a photo and then click “Choose.”

Click on the edit icon, the pencil in the circle, to adjust the zoom of the photo. I’ll click minus to zoom out…so now fits from top to bottom.

I can also change the layout. Let’s choose Split Screen, and now I can add text over here—or another photo—but let’s add text. “We go back a long way…”

Click somewhere off the video to commit that and then you can click on it and drag it to a different location.

You can also choose a Theme. The Sage theme has already been applied to my video because I used it the last time, so it just defaulted to it, but I can choose a different one.

Each theme has it’s own colors, transitions, and fonts. For my topic, though, I think Sage is a good choice.

You have a few more color options as well, but the colors aren’t as robust as the Adobe Spark Post options. For my topic I like the warm gray and brown colors.

Click the arrows again for another color option, and click again to get back to the original color you chose.

Notice there’s an option at the top to Resize and that’s referring to your actual video proportions. Square is a popular proportion for Instagram and Facebook, but for a slide show like mine a rectangle works best.

There’s also a music option where you can choose various soundtracks or upload your own.

Getting back to the video itself, the only thing left for this thumbnail is to resize my photo because clicking on Theme resized it to the default for that theme. I’ll click on the photo, click on edit, and zoom out a bit…right about there.

So that’s my first thumbnail! To duplicate this thumbnail click on the dotted circle and choose Duplicate, but my next photo is horizontal so instead let’s just click on the thumbnail again to get rid of that, and this time I’ll click on the Plus thumbnail on the left.

Click on the Photo icon. Click on Upload Photo, and double click on the next photo to open it.

Notice there’s a circle with a plus in the center. You can click on that if you want to add text or icons, but since I won’t be doing that I’ll simply click on the plus thumbnail again and continue adding photos to my slideshow.

Once I add all my slides I can rearrange them by clicking and dragging a thumbnail to a new spot.

If you want to delete a thumbnail, click on it to select it, click on the dotted circle, and choose Delete. Click to confirm and the slide will disappear.

As you’re working on your slideshow you can click the Preview option at the top or the play button in the lower left corner at any time to check it out. Click the X to exit the slideshow.

I find that the default of 2 seconds is a little fast and that 4 seconds works better. To change the time click on the time icon in the lower right corner of the video and then move the slider to change it, and I’ll change it to 4 seconds. Unfortunately, there’s no way to change the time globally yet, although users are asking for that feature. For now you’ll have to change the time on each slide, so let me go do that and then I’ll show you the finished slideshow.

Now all my slides are 4 seconds, I’ve made my final tweaks to each slide, and I’ve chosen a different music called Sweet Arrival.

Let’s take a look at the finished slideshow.

So that’s how to create a wonderful slideshow with Adobe Spark Video!

In Part 1 of Upscale Slideshow I showed you how to create a slideshow with photos, themes, and music. In this video I want to add a couple more slideshow ideas for you starting with the option of adding a voice recording.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the big red microphone right in the middle down here of the video. It does exactly what you expect it to do—it records your voice, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

You must click and hold the button down the entire time you’re talking. Be sure to lean in close to your computer or mobile device—otherwise your voice won’t be loud enough, especially with music playing in the background.

Also, add one second of time before you start to speak and leave one second of time after you finish speaking so your voice doesn’t get clipped off at the beginning or end.

Let me demonstrate. I’ll go ahead and click on the microphone and do it. “You Two Are Still Best Buds After 34 Years!”

OK. Once you make your recording click the play button to hear it. Notice that the time increased to accommodate the time you take to speak but only up to 30 seconds, so this is meant for shorter comments.

If you don’t like how it came out simply click and hold to record again as many times as you want.

To remove the recording click on the time icon and click Remove Narration.

Now, let’s get the man himself—my husband—to give a short message to our son.

OK Charlie, you’re on!

Happy Birthday, Caleb. Sure do love you man!

Alright, let’s listen to it.

Alright. So that will sound better when we view the entire video.

Now let’s go to the second thing I want to teach you, and by the way, thank you, Charlie. That was great!

The next thing I want to show you is how to make a beginning slice for this video—something that gives the video a nice introduction.

We’ll create it in Adobe Spark Post, so click on the Spark icon in the upper left. Then click on the Plus to make a new project. Scroll down and click on YouTube Thumbnail. And it’ll take just a little bit to load, and here it is.

This is really fancy and beautiful, but it’s a little too much for my slideshow, so I’ll just get get rid of most of this by just clicking on it and clicking Delete.

I really only want one picture. I want to delete the photo…let’s delete the whole section…this one also. So now we just have one photo here and I can click on it. And what I want to do is add a photo. I want to replace it with a photo.

So let’s find some free photos here. We’ll type in birthday cake and press Enter, and here I have some nice photos. This one looks like it might work perfectly, so I’ll click on that. Yeah, that looks great! So let’s scale this just a little bit. I want to make it a little bigger. Yeah that looks good right there.

And that’s all that I really want to do with the photo. Let’s also change the color of the background. And I want to use maybe one of these nice gray colors—maybe like that. That looks good.

So that’s how fast it is to create a nice front cover photo for your video.

What I need to do now is just simply save this and download it. It’s already saved, actually, I just need to click Download and it will download to my computer. And then in the next little bit here I’ll show you how to open it up and put it on our video.

OK, here we are back at our slideshow. I went back to my Adobe Spark Projects page and opened my slideshow called Best Buddies so now I’m ready to add the image I created in Adobe Spark Post, which I already downloaded to my computer.

Click on the new thumbnail icon. Click on Photo and Upload Photo and I’ll double click on my image.

One problem I see is that we now have two Adobe Spark branding icons. If you have an Adobe subscription of any kind and you log in with your Adobe ID, your projects won’t be branded by Adobe Spark, but that’s OK. I can take that into account when I create the intro slice or I can modify the card after I upload it.

In this case let’s click on the Edit icon and zoom in a little bit until we don’t see that second Adobe Spark brand.

Now I’m going to click and drag this thumbnail to the start of our slideshow, and we’re ready to click the play button to see the finished video!

So that’s how to add a voice recording on any slide and also how to add an intro image at the beginning of your video.