Have you ever wanted to create a slideshow video but your pictures are all in portrait orientation? Or maybe your photos are in landscape and you want to create a short social video like a TikTok or Instagram reel.
If so, you may have encountered the issue of a tedious process of cropping and re-sizing them to be the correct size. Now, some video editing apps allow you to do this, but let’s say you want to do it in advance?
Affinity Publisher to the rescue. The process described below will get your photos into a document quickly, and then you can make quick adjustments to positioning and scale, and in minutes you are ready to export your newly cropped photos.
Watch the video tutorial, or if you prefer to just read through the steps with screenshots, scroll below.
Since there were a lot of screenshots, scroll through the galleries of each section and see the steps in the captions.
Step 1 & 2: Set Up Your Document
In the Web presets, I chose the FHD 1080 px preset.
Change the width to 1920 px and the height to 1080 px. If you are in the the
Document Setup window, you could also just flip by switching from portrait to
landscape.
Step 3-8 Setting up your pages
Open your Pages window, if it isn’t already open. You can find the Pages dialog box under the Window menu.
Click on the Master Page so it is surrounded by a blue border.
Click on the picture frame tool and draw out a picture frame the entire size of your document.
Make sure the master is applied. In the Pages section, right-click on page 1 and select Apply Master and ensure
that Master A is applied.
In the Pages window, select Add Pages. I have 10 photos so in the pop up dialog, I added 9 additional pages.
Step 9-11 Place your images in bulk
Navigate to the File menu and choose Place. Note: clicking Replace image in the
contextual toolbar does not seem to allow you to select multiple photos to place
so we need to File–>Place.
When you select Place, it will bring up your File Explorer. Select all the
photos by holding Shift while clicking the first and lasts photo, or drag over
the area with your mouse.
Once you click open in your file folder, a new window will appear in Publisher with all of your images. Select the top
one, hold Shift, select the bottom one and then click on the first page in your
document.
Step 12-14 Make adjustments & export
Click on each photo and make adjustments. Use the 4 arrows icon in the center to reposition the photo.
Use the slider to scale it in or out.
Note: in the contextual toolbar under Properties, I have Scale to Max fit
selected, so all my photos imported to fill the frame. Since I am laying out
Portrait photos in a Landscape document, it scaled them to fit the width of my
frame.
You are now ready to Export.
All in all, I was able to edit 10 photos in just a minute or two. If you make these sorts of slideshow videos often, you may want to save your text frames setup (before you import your images) as a template so that you can come back to this file and skip the setup and go straight to placing your images.
