Hello. It is that time of year. We have family events galore. I'm so glad you're joining me here tonight. Or maybe you're watching a recording later on. I'm Mollie, and it is time for live with Mollie. And I just want to do a couple things before I dive into talking about family events and how slideshows can make it be, really warm and fun time together.
So we have a few housekeeping items. First of all, many of you know how passionate I feel about saving last month's photos, and I would be remiss if I didn't remind you you should go and delete the pictures off of your phone from the last month that you know you'll never need again, and the pictures that you want to keep.
You should get to a folder on your computer so that you have the best of your family memories preserved there, and then we recommend uploading them to Forever Permanent Storage. Or you can choose a cloud storage that you like yourself. So that is my reminder. Save last month's photos. When you do this, you are creating a habit that will keep going with you through the end of the year, and at the end of the year, you can look back and see you have organized a lot and it helps you set the stage for saving your memories for other things that you're going to need them for, like celebrating your family at their milestone events.
So that was housekeeping number one. Next, I want to mention some very exciting news. Many of you have seen me do events with Krista Kowalczyk. She is the photographer down in Florida who experienced the flooding from Hurricane Ian. And during that time she helped save, a lot of photos. But she couldn't save enough. So many families lost important memories.
And not just a few, but nearly all of their pictures and photo albums in that horrible natural disaster, which happens again and again, you know, through the years. Krista is really passionate about saving pictures because she's seen the firsthand effects of disaster. She and I have partnered together to do something a little different to help encourage people to start good photo saving habits.
In February 2026, I am super excited to announce that we are doing a cruise together in the Bahamas, and I think we're going to Cozumel. It is called the Great Photo Voyage and I will post a link for you to learn more about this. But it's February 16th through the 21st and we're going to have classes on saving family memories.
We're also going to have photo walks in our ports of destination, and just trying to help people feel a little more comfortable about saving their family memories. And, we'll be talking more about that in the future. Then I wanted to just throw out there for those of you who are joining live, if you've got questions you'd like me to answer about your photo projects, you can throw them in the comments below.
I will answer those towards the end of the program if I can, and I'm happy to do that because, boy, there are sure a lot of different topics that really stumped people when they're saving their family memories. And I would love to answer all of them if I could for you. Especially if it keeps you going. And I'm saving your pictures.
All right, one last announcement. And this is just a minor change, but our live program I scheduled for Monday evenings at 630, and I'm just finding this a little challenging, to keep up with that schedule. So we're going to move the live with Mollie show to 2 p.m. central time on Monday afternoons. So, if you're marking your calendars, you might have to change them for for the time change.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about family slideshows. The reason this topic is on my mind is because I'm actually in the process of making one for friends. Actually, we have been friends with a church family for going on 20 years, and I have loved seeing the kids grow up and then the grandkids come and now the grandkids are getting married.
I have helped the grandmother who's dear friend of mine save a lot of photos over the years. So when she asked me a couple months ago if I would make the slideshow for the wedding, it was easy to say for sure. I'd be happy to do it. And, she did have some photos already saved, in her forever account.
And it was easy for me to get to those pictures. I forgot that we were going to need pictures from the groom's side of the family. Very important. So, my friend had emailed me the link to get those pictures, but it was several weeks ago, and I was, not sure what I did with that email. And sure enough, when I went looking for it on Thursday last week, I couldn't find it.
So I had to ask my friend for the link again. And this is just one. Well, maybe there's two morals of the story there. The first moral of the story is whenever anybody sends you a link for pictures, you know you're going to want to keep take care of that right away. Download the pictures and get them to a safe place.
The second moral of the story is even I procrastinate. There's no reason I should be waiting until six days before the wedding to put the slideshow together. But I know that's sometimes how life rolls, and I don't think I'm the only one that that has done that. Anyway, when my friend emailed me the link for the Fiance's Growing Up pictures, I realized it was a Google Drive link, and when I clicked on it, it took me to a zipped folder of pictures.
So the fiance's family did a really good job of gathering all of their pictures together into a folder on their computer. They then zipped it and uploaded it to Google Drive, and that works really well. When you zip a folder, you can just right click on it and zip it if you're working on a PC, if you're on a mac, it's called compressing a folder.
Anyway, the result is a zipped folder that takes less time to upload and download, and I was really excited. Like, I've been helping people with their photos for over 15 years in one way or another, and I've never had a zipped folder in Google Drive emailed to me before the link, so it was really cool. I could download it and in that folder was like 5060 photos right from the groom's family.
And now I can put the rest of the slideshow together. So when I put a slideshow together personally, I really like to go the easy route. I mean, as with anything in working with your pictures, there's probably five different ways of doing something even more. So what I do is I get all of those pictures in the folder, and then I take those pictures and I import them to Apple Photos on my Mac.
Now, I know a lot of you are PC users and that won't work, but in my case, it does. And I'll have another, solution for you in a bit. So anyway, I import them into Apple Photos on my Mac and the program just creates a slideshow for me. I can add pictures and take them out. I can rearrange them a little.
I can even add music if I want. And then I export the slideshow and it's it's done. Now, when you have pictures in a slideshow that is automatically generated for you, you do have to go photo by photo and make sure heads aren't chopped off. So if you have a portrait picture and you really don't want it to be in a horizontal, layout, the head could be gone.
So you have to double check that. But essentially you just want to not have to worry about a lot of details when you don't have much time, which is my case. Now, for those of you who you know want to know about more options for creating a slideshow, I've. I've got a whole bunch of things to run by you, but the first thing that you always have to do with the slide two is gather up all the photos that you want in it so you can have printed pictures, printed pictures and envelopes and albums.
And if you're going to take pictures out of places, put a note and remember to put those pictures back in because they're the important ones you're taking out. Probably. And you get them out and you're going to scan those pictures. All right. Then you might have digital pictures on your phone or on social media. You're going to download them and get them all to one, that one folder on your desktop, you can just call it, you know, wedding slideshow or graduation slideshow.
Gather it all together. A funny situ, actually, it's not a funny situation. The most frustrating situation is when you are dealing with pictures that could be in a variety of places. Take the year 2005. My. The bride who's getting married? She has pictures from 2005. However, back then we actually still were taking film pictures with a, you know, a real film that we had to get developed.
We also had digital cameras, and when we would take either our roll of film or our camera card in, we would get a DVD back of our pictures and the prints, and sometimes we would take those DVDs and copy them on to the computer, and all of a sudden you can have a lot of versions of your photo in the in a lot of different places, and not being able to find it anywhere.
So frustrating. This is why I like to teach, you know, organize your pictures and leave the projects for later. But we are on a mission here for a family event. Slideshow this summer, right? Anyway, you're gathering all the pictures together and as you are gathering them, you can start thinking about, you know, how are these going to play?
What's the structure? What's the story that you're trying to tell? A simple way is to not worry about any structure. Just have the photos play randomly. Another way would be to organize them chronologically. It kind of works nice for the graduation parties to see the photos from being born all the way to graduation. That can work nicely. We had a client who was celebrating his dad's 90th birthday, so his slideshow was going to be a little bit more of a production.
In fact, he had pictures designated for each part of our client's dad's life. We had the the birth picture, not birth, but baby pictures and toddler. And then we had the young, young child years and then teenagers graduating from high school. And then, military service and then meeting his wife and then having children, starting a family, you know, through the years.
Retirement. Of course, when you reach 90, there's a lot of milestones in there. And so each section of the slideshow had a title, and he varied the music playing for each section. So that one was a pretty complicated project. Project. And you will have to figure out what you want to do. The more you want in your slideshow, the more time you're going to need to do it.
All right, so what we want to do is just start thinking about the structure of the slideshow. If you're like me, you know, quick and done is better than, laboring over it and getting frustrated and saying, well, I'll do it next year. Okay. So, those are some ideas about how you can have the slides play. Now, I do want to mention if you're scanning pictures, you probably pulled the scanning the photos out that were most important.
And save those not only in the folder on your desktop, the slideshow project folder. I would also save them in, what we call your photo estate folder. This is your master folder that you're keeping all of the important pictures for the future. So I have them in both places so you don't lose track of those pictures in case you never get back to organizing the rest of them and scanning them all.
Another way that you can gather pictures digitally, depending on what you're using, is you can create a tag for pictures. So in Apple Photos it's actually called keywords. You could create a keyword for the slideshow I use forever a lot, and the tag I make is just slideshow project. And then I start tagging the things that I want to be in the slideshow.
So tags can be useful for you too, as you're gathering your pictures.
Now, I would say you don't need a ton of photos, okay? A 100 pictures playing at three seconds each makes about a five minute slideshow, and five minutes is really easy to sit through and watch with people and enjoy it and then move on to the next thing. If you have 200 pictures, then you're looking at 8 to 12 minutes, depending on how the transition ends and how how that all times out.
But ten minutes is getting to the longer end of, being able to watch it. And when you think about watching the slideshow, there are a couple options for that as well. So if you did have a five minute slideshow, you could just have it be playing on a loop. It just starts over and people come and go and see it.
If you have a longer slideshow, you can also have that play on a loop. We did have our client whose dad celebrated 90th, his 90th birthday. They actually played it and had everybody sit down together to watch it at least the first time, and then you could loop it later. So there's, there's options and how you're actually going to play the slideshow.
All right. So you, you can kind of think about what would work best for your event. Now if you want to do something more than just that simple folder on a USB drive plugged into the smart TV, you can use a program to do those things I was talking about, like adding titles and, music and things like that.
So some of the options you have to do that are, they're free. So we I talked about Apple Photos on the Mac, iMovie on the Mac is another one that has even more, options for adding things into making the slideshow interesting on a PC. The program is called clip temp, and you do have to download it from the Microsoft App Store.
But Clip Champ is free and it gives you lots of options for editing, even adding video in and the titles and the music and things like that. So you can use that kind of a program if you want to go down the route of paying for software, there's other options out there. One that I have seen people use is called Wondershare Filmora, and that would be, a good program to I think it the last I looked at was like $40 a year or something like that.
So you're going to either get all of your photos into a folder, put it on the USB drive, or you're going to use a program to make your slideshow. When you're done with the slideshow in the program, you need to export it as an MP4 or some video format that will play you know, on a smart TV or even directly from your computer.
Of course it would. But, you need to export the slideshow from the program and then you can take the slideshow. So now it's a video format, and you can put that on the USB and it can go into a smart television. Or maybe you leave the slideshow right on your computer and you connect your computer to a TV with an HDMI cable.
The HDMI cable is nice because you can just have the program right on your computer while it's, you know, or the videos playing on your computer, and it's extended on to a larger screen. I have seen where people connect their computer with an HDMI cable to a projector, and it's it's displayed on a huge screen as well. So that HDMI cable is an important one, whether you're at home or you're at a venue that might just, have a large screen TV, you can connect to them.
One last option that I have seen, both in bars and halls and funeral homes, is when you give the USB drive with the slide show on it, too. Who's ever running the show at the the hall or the bar? And then they plug it into their computer, and their computer sends the video to all of the video screens in the place.
And that's pretty awesome to see it playing in a few different areas. So you have that as an option. And of course, with technology there is other things you can do. Some people will make a QR code and put it on a card, and then everybody can watch the video right on their phone because they have a QR code.
Now, in order to do that, you do have to upload your video to a cloud site like, Dropbox or Forever. We recommend forever, but, you get the video up to a cloud storage site, and then you get the QR code generated, and then put that on the card that you give out to people, and they can watch it at their convenience.
And that's kind of fun too. And people can watch the slideshow, pause it when they want to chat about it and all of that. So we have no end of ways to enjoy our family memories with each other. It's just taking the time to actually put it together. All right, so now you have the slideshow created. I like to recommend that, you save the pictures with the slideshow because eventually, you know, someone will be watching the slideshow and they're going to wish that they had the picture that they really want from inside it.
So when we're done here with creating slideshows for our clients, we upload the slideshow along with the individual pictures to an album in forever so that people have the video and the pictures as well. That's pretty much all I can think of to tell you about creating photo slideshows right at the moment. And I'm totally open to answering any questions that, might have come up as I was chatting away here.
And, while I see if there is anything I will just mention that it's just priceless. Watching memories with people. When you have a photo slideshow, especially doing it all together, it seems like, you know, you have to have a reason to look at pictures. Just calling up and having and sending someone a link to a slideshow isn't as effective as when you're together as a family.
And and that's the power of photos. They connect us. They connect the generations. The little ones, to the the oldest ones. And, that's something that's being lost. So if we don't take the time to enjoy our memories together, we're going to be sorry someday. And that's why I'm doing this show. So at this point, I don't think there are any more questions any out there.
I have a little helper in the background and. Oh, this is a good question from my helper in the background and, from Flighty Lens asking, where can I get music for the slideshow? This actually is a good question because, you know, theoretically, music is copyrighted, especially any of the good songs that you want to put in.
We've had that question over the years. And, when we create a slideshow for a client, we don't add copyrighted music. We'll use what's called stock music. And the best stock music that we have found is at Pop and Fiverr.com. So that's pond5.com for most families situations. So it doesn't really I think you can play it, have a song and a slideshow and nothing.
No police are going to come knocking on your door for copyright violation if you upload that video to YouTube, YouTube will put the copyright notice on it, and any money that was made from that video probably will go back to the songwriter or whomever manages that song's, financial collections. So, in terms of music, you can, you know, you can go to Spotify, download it and then use it for personal, you know, reasons, personal use and then, you can go to a stock music site like Pon 5.com.
I've also used music, crop and I want to say cropped, but you can like, if you have video from a concert that you went to, especially our kids concerts, you can take the audio off of that and use it for the client who, I mentioned about the 90th birthday party. His mom was a piano player, and so they used a couple pieces of his mom's piano playing for the audio in the background of the slideshow as well.
So I hope that answers that question for you. There's a lot of places where you can, you know, come up with music and, you have options, especially if you're doing it yourself. We when we had clients who were like, really hopeful to have certain music, we we'd help them with a couple directions and how they could add it themselves.
All right. Let's see. You are quite welcome. All right then, I think those were the things that I wanted to talk about tonight. I am happy to answer any other questions you know, if you are watching later, you can put the comments down below. You can email us and we'll do a future episode on the topic that you're looking for more information on.
In the meantime, go delete some photos and, save some of your favorite memories and we'll see you the next time. Take care.
