Create A Photo Reel For Instagram and Facebook
World Wildlife Day, March 3, 2023, has come and gone, but it inspired me to create a photo reel for Instagram and Facebook—something I had never done. When I first learned of World Wildlife Day I was on my way to Indonesia. I was sitting in the Seoul airport before getting on our last flight to Bali, and I needed to get it done ASAP. It was late afternoon back in the states, and I wanted to make sure the post was published on the actual World Wildlife Day. I had to work fast.
My first thought was to drop still images into my favorite video editor, Wondershare Filmora. I could then customize the timing, which I felt should move quickly to create a photo reel for Instagram and Facebook. Thankfully, I can carry my entire 1.4 million image catalog with me wherever I go since I use a program called Mylio Photos. With Mylio Photos, I have a 4TB SSD that is large enough to hold Previews of all my 1.4 million pictures. All Previews are large enough for blog posts, Facebook, or any other use other than magazines or large prints.
Mylio Photos To Start
To start my project off, I opened Mylio Photos and typed into the search box “vertical.” Knowing how Reels are supposed to look, I decided to use vertical images. With Mylio Photos I found all verticals in my library, and I then started grabbing a few, and in all I chose 40 images. I checked them all for the proper cropping and quality and then exported them with 1920 pixels on the long side to a folder on my desktop.
Wondershare Filmora 12
Next came a video program I use called Filmora by Wondershare. I imported the jpegs into Filmora and then dropped them in the timeline. I adjusted the timing of each image to be .05 seconds and then exported it. The entire project from finding vertical images, exporting those photos, and then importing them into Filmora, retiming, and exporting the video, was just 36 minutes. I uploaded the video and made the deadline for World Wildlife Day before my next flight. Overall the whole project, from start to finish, was pretty quick. But then I started thinking I may have missed an even quicker option. That’s when I remembered Mylio Photos has an Export stills as a video option.
Mylio Photos to Finish
Since I had already created an Album in Mylio Photos with the images I wanted to use, all I had to do was select them all, right click>Share>Export As Video. That was all of maybe one minute.
Super fast but with the caveat that I’m unable to add my logo as a watermark and can’t add the end of the video bumper for Pygmy Wolf productions. For most photographers, this would not be a problem so Mylio Photos is an even fsater option to create a photo reel for Instagram and Facebook.
Let me know your thoughts on how you create a photo reel for Instagram and Facebook in the comments below.
