How to Make a Video with Photos and Music on Your Cell Phone

InShot: Video and Photo Editor

4,9 24,777,779 reviews

500 mi+downloads

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It's two hours until your grandmother's 80th birthday party. The cake is in the fridge, the living room TV is already on, and someone asks: "What about the video with her photos?". Your phone's gallery has 40 photos scattered between screenshots and memes, and the song she's always sung is playing in your headphones.

This turns into a movie before the birthday song. In this guide, you'll create a video with photos and music step-by-step directly on your phone: choose the photos, arrange them in order, add transitions, write a message on the screen, fit the soundtrack, and export it in high quality to show on TV or send to the family group chat. It's perfect for birthdays, trips, weddings, and tributes.

InShot: the editor that transforms your gallery into a movie.

InShot is one of the highest-rated video editors for mobile phones. On Google Play, it has a 4.9 rating, with over 24 million reviews, and more than 500 million downloads. On the Brazilian App Store, it also has a 4.9 rating. The app is free to download and works on Android and iPhone.

• Slide presentation: You choose the photos, and each one becomes a segment of the video, in the order you define.
• Music the way you want it: Use the tracks from the app's library, import a song saved on your phone in MP3 or other formats, or extract the audio from another video.
• Your voice in the video: Record a message using the app itself, like a recorder, and place it over the photos.
• Transitions: A touch between two photos, and the transition from one to the other, creates a cinematic effect.
• Text and stickers: Over 100 fonts and over 1,000 animated stickers for names, dates, and messages.
• The right format for each screen: 9:16 for status updates, Reels, and TikTok; 16:9 for TV and YouTube; 1:1 for the feed. Photos that don't fill the screen will have a colored or blurred background.
• Export in up to 4K at 60 frames per second.

In the free plan, the app displays ads and the video comes out with the InShot watermark. The InShot Unlimited subscription removes both of these things and unlocks paid materials, such as filter packs and stickers.

How to make a video with photos and music in InShot

1. Install InShot using the button at the top of this page, or from Google Play or the App Store.
2. Before opening the editor, gather your chosen photos into a gallery album. Finding 40 photos among 5,000 within the editor takes much longer.
3. Open InShot, start a new video, and grant access to your photos when the app prompts you.
4. Tap the photos in the order they should appear. The first one you select opens the video. Confirm to move everything to the timeline.
5. Tap on Screen Choose the aspect ratio: 16:9 for the party TV, 9:16 for your WhatsApp status. If the photo leaves empty spaces on the sides, replace the background with a blur of the photo itself.
6. Tap on a photo in the timeline and adjust how long it stays on the screen. The most important photos deserve a few extra seconds.
7. Tap the small icon that appears between two photos and choose a transition. Do the same for the other transitions.
8. Tap on Music Choose a track from the app's library or a song saved on your phone. Drag it along the timeline so the strongest beat falls on the most beautiful photo, and trim the end of the song so it finishes along with the last photo.
9. Tap on Text Write the message: “Happy 80th birthday, Grandma,” the date of the trip, and the couple's names. Use Sticker For hearts, confetti, and balloons.
10. Want to touch someone's heart? Record your voice with a short message and place it over the last photo.
11. Watch the entire video once, from beginning to end, and adjust anything that is rushed.
12. Tap on Save, Choose the resolution and frame rate and wait for the export to finish. The video will go to your phone's gallery, ready to send on WhatsApp, post on Instagram, or play on TV.

Three itineraries that work

• Birthday: Chronological order, from the baby photo to last year's cake. The birthday person's favorite song and, at the end, their age in large letters on the screen.
• Trip: Follow the path you took. Open with your suitcase or the airport, go through the places in the order you visited them, and close with the last sunset. Upbeat music, quick photos.
• Homage: Mother's Day, weddings, retirement, farewells. Calm music, each photo displayed longer on screen, and your recorded voice at the end. The last photo remains still for a few seconds after the music finishes.

Tips to make your video look professional

• Do the math first: A 3-minute song with 3 seconds per photo can hold 60 photos. Only have 20? Choose a shorter song or trim the one you have.
• Choose photos with your face: Taking a landscape photo without anyone in it gets boring quickly. One per block is enough to give some context.
• One transition only: Repeating the same effect throughout the entire video makes everything look more elegant than changing it with each photo.
• Short text: If the person can't read the sentence before the photo changes, it's too large.
• Resolution by destination: For sending via WhatsApp, 1080p is already clear and the file arrives faster. For the large TV in the living room, export at the highest resolution your phone allows.

CapCut: Music and effects for social media videos

CapCut surpasses 1 billion downloads on Google Play, where it has a 3.5 rating with over 13 million reviews. In the Brazilian App Store, the rating rises to 4.7. It's free and allows you to cut, reverse, and change the speed of clips, with a large library of music, filters, effects, and animated fonts for text. It's the choice for those who want a photo video with the rhythm of short videos from social media.

VN: the photos change to the beat.

VN has a 4.8 rating on Google Play, over 100 million downloads, and a 4.9 rating on the Brazilian App Store. Its standout feature for video with music is AutoCut: you choose a beat pattern, and the app automatically synchronizes the clips with the music. If you prefer to do it manually, you can mark the beats on the timeline and fit each photo to them.

• Timeline with multiple layers For photos, videos, text, and stickers all at once.
• Automatic captions generated from audio, in various languages.
• Export in up to 4K at 60 frames per second.

Canva: Let AI assemble the first cut.

Canva has a 4.9 rating on Google Play, over 500 million downloads, and a 4.9 rating on the Brazilian App Store. For those who don't want to deal with a timeline, the Magic Video feature uses your own photos and videos to create a video from start to finish, with editing done by the app's AI. Then you just adjust what you want, add music and sound effects, and generate automatic captions.

Which app to choose?

To put together your party video today, start with InShot: photos, music, transitions, text, and your voice all in one editor, on Android or iPhone. Install it using the button at the beginning of this page, select your photos, and press play before the cake arrives at the table.