Video Slideshow

The Video Slideshow tool allows creation a movie from a list of photos. The generated file can be played on a video player or a TV screen. Images are presented one by one with visual effects if you need them. This tool can also be used to create a time-lapse animation from shots taken with an intervalometer.

Select the images that you want to encode as video and go to Tools ‣ Create video slideshow a wizard dialog will open up as below.

The Video Slideshow Wizard Welcome Page

This page allows to select the contents to export: from current items selection, or from a list of albums. With the Albums selection mode you can generate a video slideshow from Albums contents. Just check the respective Albums displayed with hierarchical nesting. On the next three tabs Tags, Searches, and Labels you can refine your selection using tags, labels, or previous search results in digiKam.

If you use the Images selection mode only the previous selection of items from Icon-View will be processed and listed on this page as a flat list.

The Video Slideshow Wizard Images Selection Page

Pressing on Next button will display all the video settings to encode the slideshow. The parameters are listed below:

  • Number of Frames by Image: The number of frames generated of one image to encode in the video stream. This defined the time of one image will be present statically on screen. If you set an Effect While Displaying Images, this one will be rendered with this number of frames.

  • Video Standard: This is the video norm to use while encoding media, as PAL - 25 FPS or NTSC - 29 FPS (FPS: Frame Per Seconds).

  • Video Type: This is the video resolution to use while encoding media. Images are resized accordingly. Take care that high resolution will need more resources to encode and use more space on your disk.

  • Video bit Rate: This is the bandwidth used to encode video. A low value means poor quality, and a high value means good quality. Take care that high rate will needs more space on your disk.

  • Video Codec: This is the standard video encoding method to make the media.

  • Effect While Displaying Image: Select here the visual effects to apply on an image while Number of Frames by Image.

  • Transition Between Images: Select here the visual effect to apply as a transition outside the Number of Frames by Image.

On the bottom of this view, the tool calculates the delay for each image on the screen including applied visual effects, and the total duration of the slideshow.

The Video Slideshow Wizard Video Settings Page

Pressing on the Next button will display all the media container settings to host the encoded contents. The parameters are listed below:

  • Media Container Format: The file format container to host video media.

  • Destination folder: The directory on disk to store the video file.

  • If Target File Exists: Allows to overwrite or not video file if it already exists in the directory.

  • Open in Player: Allows to render video slideshow and end to encoding, with the digiKam internal player or the default desktop application.

The Video Slideshow Wizard Output Settings Page

Pressing on the Next button will start the video encoding. This stage can take a while depending on the number of items to process and the delay to use for each image to generate as a video.

The Video Slideshow Wizard Generating Output File

Finally, when encoding is done, a preview of the video file is displayed.

The Video Slideshow Preview Displayed in digiKam Internal Player