imovie

So, you want the song to come to its natural end right at the conclusion of the slideshow. (Unfortunately, there is no "fit to music" feature in iMovie.)

There are three ways to fit your music to the slide show:

1. Select your slides as a batch (Shift-select). Click on the little circle icon with an "i" in it in the tool bar in the upper right of your screen. In the duration box that appears to the right, type in a new duration for the slides to match the length of your music. Then press the Return key on your keyboard to set the change. There may be a little trial and error in it. Alternatively, you could choose certain slides in the show and increase and/or reduce their length to make the slideshow fit the song. Other ways to vary the duration of the slideshow would be to increase the lengths of transitions, add titles, put a black background spacer at the start, and so on.

2. Somewhere in the middle of the song, at an appropriate place, remove a section to make the song fit.

3. Make your slideshow in the photos app without music. (Or make the slideshow in iMovie without music.) In either case, export the slideshow to your desktop as a movie. Import the movie into your iMovie slideshow project. Add your song. Now, control-click on the slideshow movie clip and select Show Speed Editor in the drop down menu. That will cause a speed adjustment slider to appear in the upper right hand corner of the video clip. Put your cursor on it to drag it to the left to speed up the slideshow, or to the right to slow it down. Adjust its duration to fit the music.

-- Rich

The easiest way would be to trim back the audio clip and add a fade with the fade sliders.

Start by expanding out your timeline with the slider next to the settings button above the timeline on the right hand side of the screen. Then put your cursor on the right hand edge of the audio clip and, while pressing down, drag the edge to the end of your movie. Then put your cursor on the audio clip to make little blue fade handles appear in the upper left and right corners of the audio clip. To add a fade, hold down the Option key while sliding the right hand corner fade handle to the left.

-- Rich

Another technique that sometimes works well, depending on the style of the song and the effect that you want, is to trim off the front part of the song, maybe adding a fade in, so that the ending concludes appropriately at the end of video portion of the slide show. Obviously if there is a spectacular or melodious beginning of the song that coordinates well with the opening slides, this method wouldn't be suitable.

-- Rich

You are welcome! Post back, if you have time, and let us know how it worked. Item #3 should work as long as there isn't a huge difference in duration between the video and the song. Otherwise, you probably would need to cut out a piece of the song to make it fit.

-- Rich