Facebook wants you to share more stuff on Facebook - so it's rolling out a new feature designed to do just that.

The social network thinks video is the answer to all its woes. According to The Information, Facebook has experienced a decline in original, personal sharing (it's down 21 per cent year over year as of mid-2015), but Live Video and video seem to be helping. People are no longer keen to post text statuses about what's going on in their lives, but they will post stories full of videos and pics to their Snapchats, for instance.

Facebook isn't Snapchat, though. Users aren't limited to 10-second clips they can overlay with doodles, text, filters, etc. But they can post 20-minute videos and boring, static photos to albums. While Facebook Live is slowly adding some Snapchat-like features, the social network still has to make the process of posting videos and pics much more fun not only for users but also for people looking at this stuff in their feeds.

That's why Facebook is now pushing an automatic movie-maker feature called Slideshow. It's similar to the new Memories feature coming to iOS 10's Photos app, and it's also a lot like the Movies Assistant feature in Google Photos. Slideshow, which originally launched in August as part of Facebook's photo-sharing app Moments, basically takes your recent videos and pics and spices them up a bit.

Facebook Slideshow: What is it?

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Facebook

Sharing videos and pics are an essential part of Facebook. Think about it: seeing and hearing your friends is a lot more appealing than reading statues about them. So, to make sharing your life much more fun, Facebook is rolling out a new feature called Slideshow. It's an easy way to create and share slideshows of, for instance, that amazing trip you took over the weekend to your family's lake house.

You don't need to download an entirely new app to use Slideshow. The Facebook app will sync with your phone's libraries and is able to detect when you've taken five or more videos/pics in the last 24 hours. Facebook will then gather the media into a slideshow and create a preview of it at the top of your News Feed. You can ignore it or post it. The choice is yours. You can even customise it.

The idea is you can now jazz up your lame videos and pics and turn them into something worth sharing (and watching).

Facebook Slideshow: How does it work?

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Facebook
  • Open the Facebook app for iOS. You do not need to download or use Facebook's Moments app.
  • If Slideshow has arrived via an over-the-air update to your Facebook app, and if you've taken more than five photos or videos over 24 hours, Facebook will show you a preview of an automatically-created slideshow at the top of your News Feed.
  • You can tap on the preview to launch the Slideshow feature within Facebook, where you'll then see a menu bar at the bottom of your screen with four tabs: add more photos/videos from your libraries, add a theme, edit your slideshow, and more/settings.
  • There are currently 10 slideshow themes to choose from, including Nostalgic, Playful, Night Out, Birthday, Epic, Thankful, Tropical, Bollywood, and Amped. Each theme comes with its own style and music and transitions. More themes will be added later.
  • Under the edit tab, you will see options to customise your slideshow by changing the order or layout, titling it, or tagging friends.
  • Once you're done, hit the Done button at the top and share your slideshow to your News Feed. Or, you could tap cancel and forget it.

Note: If you don't see a Slideshow preview at the top of your News Feed, try finding a friend's slideshow in your News Feed and clicking "Try It".

Facebook Slideshow: When will it be available?

Facebook is now rolling out Slideshow to all iOS users around the world.