Chris Szulwach recommended a great website to me (via Twitter) for making video slideshows from pictures. At first I thought it would be just another iPhoto kinda thing where the pictures zoom in and out a bit with a Ken Burns effect, but boy was I wrong.

Animoto.com takes your pictures, analyzes your music background, and melds the two together in a way that feels somewhat like MTV video. You can either upload your pictures manually or send Animoto to fetch them from other sites like your Facebook account, Picasa, or Flickr. Adding music works the same way: upload your own mp3 or select a track from their growing library of music beds. Once it has your pictures and music, it analyzes both and puts them together in a pretty sweet video. And, for an extra measure of fun, send the pics and music through again and again to get other remixes of your slideshow. No two videos are ever the same.

Animoto.com also has several distribution options. Once the video is complete and your satisfied with the output, you can easily send it off to all your friends, post it on your website, download it, send it to YouTube, and more.

Thirty-second clips are free, but most of us will probably want to opt for the unlimited videos and downloads, which costs $30/year if you sign up with this referral link. Or, you can pay $3/video.

Have fun creating lots of cool photo slideshow videos of all your youth group camps, mission trips and events from this summer! But be careful: Animoto.com really gets addicting. Here’s one I created of our missions trip to Belize two weeks ago.

Posted on July 8, 2008