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Working with Photos and Videos

13th December 2022

Jacob Woolcock

2:27

A key part of using Freeform is knowing how to use Photos and Videos effectively. In this short tutorial I’ll show you ho to insert both photos and videos as well as how to style, resize and adjust them. I’ll also teach you how to use other shapes from the Shape Library to mask your photos to make them more interesting and dynamic.

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All right, let’s bring in some photographs into our new Freeform board. So, at the bottom, we’re going to tap on the ‘Insert From’ button, and then from here, we can choose ‘Photos’. This will then bring up all your photo albums, and I’ve got one here ready to go for Cologne. Now, when I tap onto this lovely picture of the cathedral in Cologne, it will then place it straight onto the board for me. Of course, being a picture, I can then make it bigger and smaller, move it around the board, and position it however I like.

It’s slightly hard to see on the screen recording, but when you add a photo like this onto a Freeform board, it will automatically get a very faint drop shadow and slightly rounded corners. This is quite a nice effect, but some people may want to turn it on or turn it off. So, if you select your photo and press the three dots, you can then disable or enable both the rounded corners and the drop shadow, just like this.

Of course, there’s definitely more than one thing I want to see in Cologne, so I’ll tap onto the insert button again, go into photos, and this time I can multi-select a few. Now, whilst I position these on my page, it might be a nice time to ask you, perhaps, to subscribe down below if you’re finding these videos helpful. As well as a whole course on Freeform, there are literally hundreds more videos to help you make the most out of your iPhone.

Okay, enough of that. I’ve now positioned four or five pictures around my title, but it’s time to add a really interesting effect to make the pictures a different shape entirely. What I’m going to do is make my photographs circular to make them a bit more interesting on my board. So, at the bottom, I’m going onto the shapes library that I used in the previous video, and from here, I’m just going to choose a circle. You’ll notice it’s kept the red and orange style from the last video as well.

Now, from this point, I’m going to scale up my circles to make it bigger so it covers the part of the picture I want, and then I’m going to tap and drag to select both my photograph and my circle. From here, I’m going to tap onto the three dots and choose the ‘Mask with Shape’ option that’s now available. I can choose to scale my photograph a little bit if I want to, to make it fit nicely, and when I press done, my picture is now a perfect circle shape. I’ll repeat this with other pictures later on.

But let’s quickly put a video in as well. So, I’ll tap that insert button, go back onto my photo library, and choose this video—the time-lapse over the Cologne Bridge. This works in the exact same way as a photograph, but of course, now you can tap that play button and play it right there on your board.

Okay, in the next video, we’re going to have a look at adding lines and connectors to start grouping things together on our board. You won’t want to miss it. I’ll see you there now.

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