Facebook want to Turn Your Pictures into Slideshows

The Verge

We've all seen one of Facebook's Year in Review videos and we know how they're made. Pictures you shared or were tagged in will be pulled together to make a video of you and your friends. This can be nice once a year if not a little annoying, but with the Moments app came the chance to make these slideshows regularly. Now Facebook has brought the feature to the main app.

This new feature is actually called Slideshow and it's Facebook's most recent attempt to encourage users to make and share more videos. To start with Facebook will automatically make a slideshow if you share five pictures or videos within the last 24 hours. These can appear in your newsfeed and if you want to try to make one yourself you can click try it. When you make your own you can customise the video's theme and music, but the video will likely remain a short clip. These could be a great way to memorise an event, but they could also become very annoying, very quickly.

Facebook want to be big when it comes to video and this Slideshow feature is a Facebook-only feature, but that doesn't make it more tempting. The slideshows can be great fun at first, but after you've seen a few, they aren't anything special. This means that users probably won't want to make too many of them unless they're really into slideshows themselves. If you like them and a friend do too then you can use this feature a lot, but if you're not sure about how someone feels about them, maybe don't tag them or include them in your video.

It's hard to say how much of a video feature this actually is. Technically these slideshows are considered videos, but they aren't anything close to what someone might share on Facebook Live, for example. They do fit in with what works best on Facebook however, as they can be silly and they are different from videos you see on YouTube or elsewhere. This probably isn't a feature that Facebook will focus on much though as they still have a lot to do on Facebook Live.

This feature is currently only available on iOS and will become available this week.

Rosina Brooker

Rosina is a Songbird writer with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is glad to be playing around with apps and writing about them in the mean time! Follow her @Songbird_Rosina

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