Shotcut tutorial · companion page
Drag your photos into the Playlist, select them all, and hand them to one dialog. Shotcut lays every image onto the timeline at a duration you choose and builds a real transition clip between each pair — five photos to a finished slideshow in about a minute.
Reading in another language? Use the translate picker in the header, or your browser’s own translate command — the Shotcut dialog, control and value names are marked to stay in English so they still match what is on your screen.
There is no filter to add and nothing to keyframe. Images go into the Playlist, one command reads the whole selection, and Shotcut writes the clips and the transitions between them onto the timeline for you.
Every image you drop into the Playlist becomes a slide, in Playlist order. Ordering happens before you generate, not after — drag the rows into the sequence you want first.
Clip duration in the generator dialog overrides whatever duration the images carried in the Playlist. Set it once and every slide gets it.
The generator does not fade with an opacity filter. It writes an actual transition clip between each pair of images on V1, the same object you would get by overlapping two clips by hand.
Aspect ratio conversion decides what happens to a photo that is not the shape of your project. It is set to Crop Center when the dialog opens, so mixed portrait and landscape sources still fill the frame.
[ Choose your transition or make it random ]
on-screen text · 1:40
This video has no chapter markers and no narration — it is a music bed with a handful of text captions. The sections below were derived from the screencaps themselves, sampled every 10 seconds. Click any screencap or timestamp to play from that exact second, right here in the card.
The video opens on the output rather than the interface: stock photographs dissolving into one another over a music bed. This is the intro montage, not the tutorial — but it is what the generator produces.
The About Shotcut dialog is held on screen: version 20.11.28. Every panel name, menu item and default value on this page is that release. The video description says V20.10:31; the dialog on screen disagrees, and the dialog is what was recorded.
On-screen text: “Drag your files into the Playlist Tab”
Files are dragged from a folder onto the Playlist panel — note the + Copy drop cursor. They land as 01.jpg, 02.jpg, 03.jpg and so on. There is no import step and no dialog.
The Playlist now holds 01.jpg through 05.jpg, each showing Duration: 00:00:01:20. That is the length an image inherits on import; the generator dialog overrides it a minute later, so it does not decide the slideshow.
Right-clicking inside the Playlist opens the menu that carries the whole feature. Select All is Ctrl+Shift+A; two rows below the familiar Add Selected to Timeline sits Add Selected to Slideshow. That second one is the entire tutorial.
The title bar counts the selection back at you — Slideshow Generator - 5 Clips. Six controls, and a live preview underneath them that plays the transition as you change it. Values as opened: Clip duration 10.0 s, Aspect ratio conversion Crop Center, Zoom effect 10 %, Transition duration 2.0 s, Transition type Dissolve, Transition softness 20 % greyed out.
On-screen text: “Choose how long you want each clip to last”
Hovering Transition duration brings up Shotcut’s own tooltip: “Set the duration of the transition. May not be longer than half the duration of… If the duration is 0, no transition will be crea…” — the dialog clips the last words off both lines. The rule is the useful part: the transition can never exceed half a slide.
On-screen text: “Choose your transition or make it random”
The Transition type list is long and Random sits at the very top of it, above Dissolve. Choosing Random gives every junction a different wipe, which is what the finished timeline in this video uses.
One track, nine clips: five images with four transition clips wedged between them, each drawn with the purple-and-teal X that marks a transition in Shotcut. The project total reads 00:00:17:00. Nothing was placed by hand.
The Export panel with the Stock preset tree open, From set to Timeline and Use hardware encoder unchecked. No preset is seen being clicked, and the pointer is resting on Advanced — so this page does not claim one. The rest of the video plays the finished slideshow back full screen.
Every number below was read off the pixels of the video. The audio is a music bed with no narration, so nothing here came from a transcript. Where a step happens between two sampled frames, it says so instead of pretending the frame shows it.
The New Project screen is where the project folder, name and video mode are set before anything is imported.
The panel spells out what happens if you leave the mode on Automatic: “the resolution and frame rate are based on the first file you add to your project. If the first file is not a video clip (for example, image or audio), then it will be 1920x1080p 25 fps.” For a slideshow the first file is always an image, so that fallback is the one that applies.
Select the images in your file browser and drag the whole set onto the Playlist panel. They are added in one gesture, in the order they arrive, and each lands with the duration an image inherits on import.
Get the order right here. The generator reads Playlist order and nothing else — reordering afterwards means dragging nine clips around on the timeline.
That 00:00:01:20 is the default image duration this installation was carrying. The video never opens the Settings menu, so this page does not state where that default is changed — and for a slideshow it does not matter, because the next dialog overwrites it for every slide.
In the Playlist, choose Select All — Ctrl+Shift+A — and right-click anywhere in the panel. The command you want is Add Selected to Slideshow, directly below Add Selected to Timeline.
Picking Add Selected to Timeline by mistake gives you the same images butt-joined with no transitions at all, and no dialog appears to tell you.
Clip duration is the first field in the Slideshow Generator dialog and it applies to every slide. The dialog opens at 10.0 s with the field already focused.
The value actually used is not readable in any sampled frame — the typing happens between them. The finished timeline gives it away by arithmetic: five slides and four 2.0 s transitions totalling 00:00:17:00 only works at a 5.0 s clip duration, because each transition swallows its own length from the pair it joins.
Transition duration opens at 2.0 s. Transition type opens on Dissolve, and Random is the entry above it — the list then runs through named wipes: Bar Horizontal, Bar Vertical, four Barn Door variants, two Diagonal, six Matrix patterns, Barn V Up, three Iris shapes, three Box wipes and Clock Top, with more below the fold.
Two hard limits, both stated by Shotcut itself in the tooltip: a transition may not be longer than half a clip, and a duration of 0 creates no transition at all.
Transition softness is greyed out while Dissolve is selected — a dissolve has no edge to soften. It becomes available for the wipes.
Confirm the dialog and Shotcut writes the whole sequence onto V1: five image clips, four transition clips, 00:00:17:00 end to end. From there it is an ordinary project — open Export, leave From on Timeline and choose a preset.
No export preset is ever clicked on camera. The Stock list is shown open — Default, H.264 Main Profile, YouTube and the rest — and the pointer moves to Advanced, then the video cuts to the finished result.
Read directly off the frames. Where the video never showed a value, the row says so rather than filling in a plausible one.
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Shotcut version | 20.11.28 | Help → About Shotcut |
| Project video mode | 18-9 1080 | New Project → Video mode |
| Projects folder | C:\Users\bespanto\Videos | New Project |
| Source images | 01.jpg, 02.jpg, 03.jpg, 04.jpg, 05.jpg | Playlist |
| Duration on import, each | 00:00:01:20 | Playlist |
| Command used | Add Selected to Slideshow | Playlist right-click menu |
| Select all shortcut | Ctrl+Shift+A | Playlist right-click menu |
| Dialog title | Slideshow Generator - 5 Clips | Opens on the command above |
| Clip duration, as opened | 10.0 s | Slideshow Generator |
| Clip duration, implied by the result | 5.0 s | Derived from the finished timeline |
| Aspect ratio conversion | Crop Center | Slideshow Generator |
| Zoom effect | 10 % | Slideshow Generator |
| Transition duration | 2.0 s | Slideshow Generator |
| Transition type | Dissolve, opened → Random | Slideshow Generator |
| Transition softness | 20 %, greyed out on Dissolve | Slideshow Generator |
| Result on the timeline | V1 · 5 image clips + 4 transition clips | Timeline |
| Project duration | 00:00:17:00 | Player readout |
| Export source | From: Timeline | Export panel |
| Use hardware encoder | Unchecked | Export panel |
| Export preset | Never selected on camera | Not claimed by this page |
| Default image duration path | Never shown | The Settings menu is not opened in this video |
| Quantity | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Slides | 5 | Dialog title and Playlist |
| Transitions | 4 | Counted on the timeline |
| Transition duration | 2.0 s | Read off the dialog |
| Project duration | 00:00:17:00 | Player readout |
| Clip duration that satisfies it | (17 + 4 × 2) ÷ 5 = 5.0 s | Arithmetic, not a frame |
Each transition overlaps the two slides it joins, so it costs its own length from the running total rather than adding to it. That is also why the tooltip refuses a transition longer than half a clip — past that point a slide would be entirely transition.
This tutorial has no narration. The audio is a continuous music bed for the full 3:18, and the teaching is done by three text captions burned into the picture. They are reproduced below in full — that is genuinely all of the words in the video.
A machine transcription of the audio returns nothing but the phrase a speech model emits over music with no voice in it, repeated eight times. There is no speech to transcribe, so this page carries no transcript — a nearly empty one would only look like something had gone missing.
