A slideshow is one of the easiest jobs in Premiere Pro, and one of the most tedious. Someone hands you a folder of photos from a conference, a wedding, or a family party and asks for something that plays for two minutes with a bit of movement. Nothing about that is hard. It is just a hundred small, identical decisions in a row.
Here are both routes: the native way with Automate to Sequence, and the one-click way with the Slideshow panel. Start with the native one, because it is worth knowing what Premiere already does for free.
How do you make a slideshow in Premiere Pro natively?
Premiere has most of the pieces built in.
- Set the still duration first. In Preferences (Settings on Mac), open Timeline and set the still image default duration. Every photo you import after that lands on the timeline at that length, so choosing it up front saves you retiming everything later.
- Import the photos into one bin and get them in the order you want. Sort by name or date in the Project panel, or rename the files before you import.
- Run Automate to Sequence. Select the stills in the Project panel, then use Automate to Sequence (the button at the bottom of the Project panel, or the Clip menu). Set Ordering to Selection Order or Sort Order, placement at unnumbered markers or sequentially, and tick the default video transition if you want a dissolve between every photo.
- Fix the framing. Photos rarely match your sequence. Select the clips and choose Set to Frame Size, which keeps the original resolution behind the scenes, rather than Scale to Frame Size, which resamples to the sequence size.
- Add the movement. This is the manual part. For each photo, set Scale and Position keyframes in Effect Controls, then right-click the keyframes and ease them so the move starts and stops softly instead of snapping.
That is a real slideshow, made with nothing but Premiere. And if you have twelve photos, it is a perfectly reasonable twenty minutes of work.
Pro Tip: Scale every photo up slightly past the frame before you animate it, around 105 to 110 percent. A pan needs somewhere to travel, and if a photo sits at exactly 100 percent, any movement drags a black edge into frame.
Why does it get tedious so fast?
The work does not get harder as the photo count climbs, it just repeats. Automate to Sequence hands you evenly timed stills with the same transition between each one, and then every bit of life you add is per clip: this one pushes in, that one drifts left, the next one pulls out. Each direction is another pair of keyframes and another round of easing.
And the timing rarely survives first contact. The client asks for the whole thing to run ninety seconds instead of two minutes, or six more photos arrive. Now every slide has to be retimed, and keyframes that were set against the old duration have to move with them.
The one-click route: the Slideshow panel
Slideshow is a panel inside Premiere Pro that does the repetitive half. You give it photos, choose how the slideshow should feel and how long it should run, and it builds the sequence with the moves and transitions already animated.
It reads from either place your photos already live:
- A folder on your drive, picked straight from the panel, with no import step first.
- A bin in your open project, if the photos are already in Premiere. Hit refresh and pick the bin.
A preview player in the panel plays the slideshow before you build anything, so you are choosing with your eyes and not guessing.
What are the looks?
The look sets the personality of the movement in one click: Classic, Modern, Energetic, Cinematic, Reel, Pop, Bounce, and Drift. Classic is the gentle fade and drift most corporate and family slideshows want. Energetic and Pop move harder and suit social cuts. There is also a randomize button if you would rather be surprised than decide.
Underneath the looks, the individual controls are all there: transition (cross dissolve, push in a direction, zoom punch, blur dissolve, wipes, or cut), easing (smooth, overshoot, bounce, elastic and the rest), and motion. Motion set to Auto (varied) is the one that saves the most hand work: each slide gets its own direction, so the slideshow does not feel like the same push repeated fifty times.
How do you control the length?
Two ways, and they are linked. Set per slide if each photo needs a fixed beat, or set the total if the whole thing has to be a minute because that is how long the music is. Drag one and the other follows, so you can match a track without doing arithmetic.
The sequence format is set in the panel too: aspect ratio from 16:9 to 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 and more, resolution up to 4K, frame rate, and whether photos fill the frame and crop, fit inside it, or keep their native size. Clip order can be name, bin order, date, or a random shuffle you can reroll until you like the arrangement.
Pro Tip: Use Fill for a mixed set of photos. Fit is honest about the whole image, but it will letterbox every portrait shot, and a slideshow that keeps flipping between full frame and pillarboxed reads as a mistake to anyone watching.
Building it into Premiere
When the preview looks right, press Create in Premiere Pro. It builds the sequence with every photo scaled, moved, eased, and transitioned. You can also place the slideshow into the sequence you already have open rather than a new one, which is what you want when the slideshow is a section inside a longer edit.
Everything it makes is ordinary Premiere work: clips with Motion keyframes and standard transitions. Nothing is locked, nothing needs the panel to stay open, and if one photo bothers you, you drag its keyframes like any other clip.
Mixed media works too. Video clips can sit alongside the photos, and a setting decides whether their audio comes along or gets dropped.
What about After Effects?
The same install runs in both apps, and the output differs on purpose. In Premiere Pro you get a sequence, ready to cut into an edit. In After Effects you get a composition built out of layers you can pull apart and re-animate. Our guide to making a slideshow in After Effects covers that side.
Which route should you use?
Honestly: if it is a dozen photos and you already have the project open, do it by hand. Automate to Sequence plus a few keyframes is fine, and you keep full control of every move.
The panel earns its place at scale and under revision. A hundred photos, a runtime that has to match a song, a client who adds more images on Friday afternoon: that is where building it by hand stops being editing and starts being data entry.
Getting Slideshow
Slideshow is included with a Filmit Studio subscription, along with every other Filmit tool, and there is a 7-day free trial. Install Filmit Studio, open Premiere Pro, and find it in Window, Extensions, Filmit Studio. Questions are welcome in our Discord.
