Create an Automatic TV Photo Slideshow for Special Occasions

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I’ll show you how I create automatic photo slideshows for special occasions to play on my TV.

I am a big fan of using the largest screen in my house -- our TV -- as a digital picture frame.  I did a video a while back about how to turn your TV and computer into digital picture frames using Google Photos.  So, that describes the process of getting all of my thousands of digital photos to scroll randomly on my TV and computer.

But sometimes, there is a special occasion where I just want a certain group of photos to play in an automatic slideshow.  Usually, these are commemorative events.  Here are some examples:

• We all contributed photos for a slide show that played during my grandma's 90th birthday party.
• My brother-in-law and sister-in-law moved across the country and I pulled all of the photos from our weekly get-togethers with them and their children for 11 years.  I played these on a loop during our last weekly pizza night before they moved.  Or
• We throw a big dance party every year and, if there isn't a big sporting event going on, I like to automate a slide show of previous photos from that party to play on the TV in a continuous loop.

These are a couple of examples, but there are lots of times each year that I find myself pulling one of these together.  These slideshows are not meant for everyone to sit down and watch, but rather to play in the background as folks are mingling with someone occasionally saying -- hey, remember that day/event/trip?  It takes everyone on a meandering walk down memory lane without it being a forced march.  People sincerely LOVE it.  There are two tricks to this 1) being able to cull through your photos and find the right ones quickly and 2) mastering the technology to make it happen without too much effort.  First

Finding the photos

I use Google Photos.  It is my one and only trick to being able to find photos quickly without literally having to look through thousands of photos.  Google Photos does face recognition and allows you to assign a name to a face.  Once it has recognized the face the first time, Google Photos automatically assigns the same name to that face every time a photo is added.  It's like MAGIC.  So, let's say I'm doing a slideshow for my grandma who just turned 96.  I COULD go through each year looking for photos -- trying to remember the occasions when I might have taken pictures of her OR I could just search for her name "Alice Wimberley" and every photo that I've taken of her over the years just comes right up.  Now I can add all of these to an album by selecting each one, clicking on the plus sign and choosing to create a new album.  Okay -- let's say I have all of the photos stored in an album that I want to play on my TV in an automatic slideshow.

Technology

So, I started off by trying to use the same system that I use for randomly playing all of my photos on my TV.  Somehow this process is glitchy, so I was getting random photos thrown in and the changes I was making weren't happening quickly or sometimes at all.  So, I'm going to share the process that I came up with.  It's not perfect, but it's also not bad!  And allows you to share the final product with everyone afterwards.

I wanted to use Chromecast to throw the photos up on the TV.  Chromecast is a $35 dongle that allows you to cast things from the Chrome browser on your computer to your TV.  Not every piece of software plays well with Chromecast, but since it is a Google product, all of the other Google products work with it.  So, I decided to use Google Slides, which is Google’s cloud-based slideshow service.  It's analogous to Microsoft Powerpoint.

First I needed to get all of the photos into Google Slides - 1 photo per slide.  I couldn't find a way to do this in bulk from within Google Slides without piling the photos on top of each other.  I really wanted to find a way to do this automatically since some albums have hundreds of photos -- and pulling one photo in at a time would take FOREVER.  Thankfully, I found this add-on called Photo Slideshow, which does exactly what I wanted.  If you Google "Photo Slideshow Add-on" it's the first real result to come up.  Clicking on the Free button launches Google Slides and take you through a permission process to add it.  Once you finish, it will appear under the Add-on Menu.

• Okay -- make sure you have all of your photos in a album on Google Photos.
• Click on Add-ons, Google Slideshow, then Import from Google Photos Album.  
• Find the album, select it, and hit Select and it will import all of the photos and put them on different slides.
• Fix - I will say that some of the photos import a little strange, so it may require some cleaning up.  For example, this got cropped when it was imported, but I just have to double click on it and change the cropping to fix it.  
• Order - So, now you can arrange these slides how you want them presented.  If you want them in a random order, you can search for another add-on called Slides Randomizer, which shuffles them randomly.  Otherwise, you can hit this button down here to display them in Grid View and drag and drop them into the order you want.
• Transition - One other stylistic thing before we start the show -- you can change the transitions to something a little fancier.  Right now the photos will switch without any transition, but by selecting Transition . . . you can chose one of the transitions from the drop down list, how fast you want the animation to occur, and then apply it to every slide.
• Present - Okay let's see how this looks.  Hit Present up here and then hit the play button.  Okay -- that looks pretty good!  Now you will note that there is no casting icon to throw this up to a TV.  Strange in a Google app, huh?  This was not at all obvious to me, but in order to cast this, we first have to . . .   
• Publish to web - Choose File, then Publish to the Web . . .  Here is where I choose how long to stay on each slide, whether to start the slideshow immediately, and to play it on a loop.  3 seconds per slide is fine and I check both of these and hit Publish.  Go ahead and copy this URL by hitting Ctrl+C.  If you want to make any changes to these options, you'll need to hit this button down here "Stop Publishing" and do this process again.  
• Cast - Okay -- now go to a new tab, paste in the URL that you copied and hit Enter.  The slideshow immediately starts to play.  And, since it is playing in a browser, I can use Chrome's cast option to throw this up to my TV.  Go to More Options, Cast . . ., and then choose the Chromecast device you want to send it to -- and it should play on whatever TV that Chromecast is attached to.  This is how this looks on mine.

There are a couple of reasons I like this process:

1. It doesn't mess up my previous settings that make my TV into a constant random slideshow for all of my photos.  AND
2. I can use the sharing settings in Google Slides or in Google Photos to share these photos or this slide show with anyone who might be interested.

I can tell you right now -- if your friends and family are anything like mine, these randomized TV slideshows will be a giant hit.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!