So fairly recently I have started making slideshows again of my images, mainly for uploading to Facebook or for personal viewing. Many moons ago my "goto" program was Proshow Gold but sadly this ended up being no longer supported and it's closest replacement involved a regular subscription. Now whilst I don't mind paying monthly for something like Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom I'm loathe to fork out on a regular basis for something I don't always use a lot.
So I did some research and came up with the Win10 Video Editor which is free and a part of the Photo Editor within Win10 plus I then paid out for the latest version of what used to be a very old slideshow program back in the day called Pictures to Exe, now PTE AV Studio.
Win10 allows you to pull together a slideshow very quickly and it's capacity to provide copyright free music which contracts/expands to the length of your slideshow and also does an awesome job of syncing the images to the beat is hard to beat. As I primarily shoot in 16:9 widescreen on my cameras now the images fit perfectly and a decent show can be knocked up in minutes. You can apply themes but be warned that batch changes on a group of images is limited to duration changes so any edits made via a theme have to be removed slide by slide.
PTE AV Studio is there for when I want more creative license and in particular when I have a mix of landscape/square/portrait orientated images to include. I bought a wicked theme from The Dom which easily encompasses these different aspect ratios with aplomb. For my PTE shows I have started to amass a collection of, again copyright free music from Facebook's library allowing me to post a show and not have to worry about attribution etc. The only downside being that to sync the images to the beat of the music it needs some manual input and I struggle to work out when an image should change according to the music!
There are plenty of videos on using PTE AV Studio by a real Guru called Barry Beckham and there are various How To videos on using the Win10 Video Editor on YouTube.
Link below to PTE AV Studio for anyone who might be interested, I bought the Pro version in order to access all areas but there is a cheaper version available.