Shuffle Photo Order For Slideshow Mac
When Apple replaced iPhoto with the new Photos app in OS X Yosemite, we lost the ability to shuffle (randomize) the slide order. This was a big loss for those of us who have to quickly create slideshows from a large number of photos for a party or school event. Often we’ll have several photos of the same subject taken about the same time. If you play back the photos in the order they were shot, parts of the slideshow seem repetitive. By shuffling the order of the photos, you can make the slideshow more interesting without spending time sifting through the whole album to find the best ones.
Lightroom: Ability to shuffle the order of images in a Slideshow I would like to have the ability to have a slideshow that you can start from a top level parent folder, and for it to be able to shuffle the order the photos appear. There's no way to randomize the order of a slideshow. This simple utility restores that ability. Point it to any Photos.app library on your system, and it will present a list of the slideshows. This photo slideshow maker offers a sizable library of professional-looking transitions, backgrounds, and effects to help professional photographers showcase images and videos in modern fashion. This photo slideshow maker pops up the ProShow Wizard when you open it to help inexperienced users make a slideshow. Extensive options for creation. When you first upload new photos, the frame will display the new photos first - in randomized order - before then shuffling them into the rest of your uploaded photos. Note: Currently, it is is not possible to change the order of the slideshow or to create separate slide shows for individual albums. The old photo slideshow seemed to have way more options. By simply right clicking, I was able to turn on/off shuffle, adjust the slideshow speed (slow, medium, and fast), pause the slideshow, turn on/off slideshow loop, etc.
Hopefully Apple will reintroduce that feature back into the Photos app sometime soon. Until then, here’s a quick way to randomly play back a collection of photos in your Photos library.
Use the screen saver
If you don’t have iPhoto installed on your Mac, the only way to shuffle the photos in a slideshow is to use the built-in screen saver. It’s not as full-featured as iPhoto as you lose the ability to control the slide time, transitions, titles and so on. However, if you need that kind of control in creating your slideshow, you can use iMovie instead.
Click the System Preferences icon on your dock,
or select it from the Apple menu.
Click on the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences.
Select the Screen Saver tab and then choose from one of the photo-related screen savers like “Ken Burns” or “Classic.”
How Do You Shuffle Photos In Slideshow On Mac
Use the Source menu to choose a set of images in Photos (e.g. an album, moment, place).
If you don’t see “Photo Library…” at the bottom of the Source menu, you need change your Photos preferences to use the Photos library as the system photo library. To do this, launch the Photos app.
Then go to the Photos menu and select Preferences.
Make sure that you’re in the General tab, and click the “Use as System Photo Library” button. Afterwards, the button should become greyed out.
Go back to the Screen Saver preferences and click on the Source menu. At the bottom of the menu you should see the “Photo Library…” item. Click on it.
Now you will see all the collections from your Photos library. Select a collection and click the Choose button.
The last step is to check the “Shuffle slide order” box.
To start the slideshow right away, click the preview image.
Background music
The screen saver slideshow doesn’t have any options to play music, but you can make up for that by with iTunes. Before starting the screen saver, launch iTunes and start playing one of your playlists.
Limitations
This method isn’t perfect––the screen saver doesn’t give you much control. You can’t change slide duration and transition types. Nor can you fit the slideshow to the length of a song or playlist.
Shuffle Photo Order For Slideshow Machines
For quickly creating a random slideshow, though, this is the easiest (and cheapest) option available.
If you have any other tips and tricks, let us know in the comments.
Windows 10 Shuffle Photos
The other way is to create a slideshow in the sidebar. Here you have the option of setting the duration of each slide to match that of the music (in my case, I had a 20 minute montage), but there is no way to randomize the order -- you have to drag by hand to set the manual order.
My idea is to title the photos with a random number, then sort by title, thereby randomizing the images. Run this AppleScript in Script Editor to do just that: Note: This solution assumes that you have created a separate iPhoto (v7) library for the slideshow, as it re-titles all the images in the library. It is easy to change this to only randomize a specific album; just change the album name in the script from photos to the album name.
After running the script, select Choose View » sort by » Title in the menu. Then select all, and create a new slideshow in the sidebar. Its order will be randomized.
[robg adds: I modified the script to add the comments and comment out the tell album line. To use the script, please follow the instructions to provide an album name and remove the tell album... line's comment marker. I did it this way because this script will re-title your images, and I didn't want anyone accidentally overwriting their laboriously-applied image titles in their main library. Creating a separate slideshow-only library is the best solution; iPhoto's help explains how to create a new library if you're not familiar with the process.]