› ›kelbyone.com099› › lightroom magazine › ›A well-done slideshow has the power to emotionally engage
your audience beyond what’s possible by viewing static still
photos alone. While Lightroom’s Slideshow module is by no
means the most full-featured product for creating a slideshow,
the fact that it’s integrated into the Lightroom workflow does
give it a major advantage over competing products. With the
introduction of Lightroom CC/6 we gained the ability to add
multiple music tracks, a way to sync slideshow transitions to
the beats in the music, a method to preview the slideshow at
different aspect ratios, an automated pan-and-zoom effect to
liven up the display of still photos, and a number of smaller
tweaks to improve the experience.
My family recently said a sad farewell to our beloved dog of
(almost) 16 years. Sixteen years that spanned a significant part
of my marriage and the entirety of my 14-year-old son’s life to
date. As you can guess, our dog’s life was well documented,
and these photos told not only his story, but the story of our
growing family from our first home to our first move, to our
son’s arrival, to his growth as a young man, and every trip,
snowstorm, naptime, and playtime along the way. I gathered
up a collection of these photos and decided to create a slide-
show to share with family and friends who knew and loved
him, and in so doing gained a new appreciation for this part
of Lightroom. If you’ve written off the Slideshow module or
simply not used it at all, you might want to give it another
chance. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of
the experience.start with a collection
While not required, it can make the start of the process a
lot simpler. I created a collection for this project and then
set it as the Target Collection by Right-clicking the collec-
tion and choosing that option from the contextual menu.
From there, you can go through your Library and add pho-
tos (and videos) to the collection by selecting them and
pressing the B key (shortcut to add to Target Collection).
I set the sort order of this collection to Capture Time, which
made sense for this project, but you can change the sort
order via the View>Sort menu (or use the Sort menu in the
Library Toolbar). You can even drag-and-drop photos while
in Grid view or the Filmstrip to create a custom sort. This
can always be changed later, if needed. From there, click
the Slideshow button in the Module picker to start creating
the slideshow.