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Create a Holiday Video Slideshow to Share Your Pictures

I made a video slideshow of pictures, using a service by our sponsor Animoto, to share with family and friends, and you can too!

I want to stay in touch with family and friends, especially during the holidays, but every December each person in my family gets to choose three fun things that we absolutely must do for the holidays, and mailing holiday cards never makes the list.

There’s only so much we can do and still maintain a fun, peaceful holiday season. As a result, I send holiday greetings through the postal mail maybe once every five years. It just takes a lot of time to do all those envelopes, and a lot of money as well. A long, formatted, printed family newsletter? That’s never going to happen.

But this year we had a lot happen in our family: we lived in Italy for a few months, we returned to the states and my daughter started kindergarten, and we bought a house! It’s a 1970’s fixer-upper in need of a serious makeover.

It seemed like this would be the right time to reach out to friends and let them know where we are right now, and even better if I could do it in a way that would save time, be cost-effective, and environmentally-friendly.

I used a holiday style from Animoto to make a video slideshow greeting that I could share with friends and family through email or Facebook.

I had so many pictures that I could have shared from this action-packed year that I was worried it would be too long, so I decided to limit myself to the pictures I could show in one minute or less. I tried to focus on the highlights and capture the best memories from the year.

Check out this video slideshow I made! It’s the best of our year in just one minute:

(You can view it full-screen by clicking on the bottom-right corner.)

Can you believe I could make this in less time than it takes to watch an episode of House Hunters International?

I was impressed by how straightforward Animoto is, and the service is so intuitive I feel like I don’t even need to explain how to use it. But here’s a quick how-to:

I selected one of the new holiday styles for my video slideshow. You add your photos/ video, add any personalized text or greetings and choose a song (they have many songs to select from or use your own). Animoto does all the work to make the images fit the music and make it look good, even with text and transitions. You get to skip the time-consuming part of the process because Animoto does it automatically for you.

Then you have a fun video slideshow you can share with family and friends.