create an image slideshow with imagination

after recently return­ing from up north with a rather large col­lec­tion of pho­to­graphs i thought it might be nice to combine them, with some music, in a slideshow. i’ve never attemp­ted any­thing like this before (prob­ably never will again) so thought i’d doc­u­ment the steps i used. under ubuntu 10.04 three tools were employed. the gimp, auda­city and ima­gin­a­tion.  if by any chance you don’t have of any of these installed run ‘sudo apt-get install gimp auda­city ima­gin­a­tion libsox-fmt-all’ without the quotes to add them…or use the ubuntu soft­ware centre.

first: resize your images. i wanted to resize my jpgs to a uniform width of 1024 pixels and tried pho­tolab for gimp to achieve this. on the pho­tolab page grab Filer­es­ize tar.gz and extract it to your gimp plugins folder ‘/home/you/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins’. start the gimp and the plugin can be found in ‘filters-photolab-batch works-mages resize’. browse to the dir­ect­ory which con­tains the images you’d like to resize and choose their new width…

once this process has com­pleted there will be a new dir­ect­ory within the ori­ginal that con­tains the resized photographs.

second: it’s now time to import them into ima­gin­a­tion. start the program and select slideshow from the top left and then ‘import pic­tures’. browse to the dir­ect­ory where the images resized by pho­tolab reside and click ok. they will appear in a time line along the bottom and the dur­a­tion of slide and trans­ition can be selec­ted for indi­vidual pics or for the whole lot (as i chose).

third: choose a piece of music that almost fits the length of your slideshow and trim it with auda­city. this is a lot easier than it looks. open your mp3 (or whatever) in auda­city and, from the left, drag the cursor between the waves until the selec­tion matches the length of your slideshow (for me this was 7 minutes and 11 seconds). select ‘trim’ from the edit menu and the tune will be cut to length. now it’s time to export the file. choose ‘export’ from the file menu and in the new dia­logue box you can choose where to save the trimmed clip to. n.b  here it might be a good idea to click options and select which bitrate to use when export­ing. even com­pressed mp3 files can use a lot of space so i selec­ted a vari­able bitrate with quality of 8 (60-105kbps). once you’ve decided on the bitrate click save and your new piece of back­ground music will be exported.

now it’s just a matter of import­ing the music into ima­gin­a­tion. repeat the step to add your images but select ‘import music’. the file will be loaded and the audio tab can be clicked to get a preview.

fouth: export the slideshow from ima­gin­a­tion. choose ‘export’ from the slideshow menu and you can then select the format of the file that will be created. i selec­ted a flash video file (flv) of medium quality. the gen­er­a­tion of the file can take some time so be patient and wait for your cre­ation to complete.

my fin­ished (and rather shoddy) attempt can be seen below…excuse the music. didn’t want to infringe any copyrights…