Kinora
Drop a folder of photos, get a beautiful video. Beat-synced, theme-dressed, and exported in true 4K.
Free, no subscription. macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later, Apple Silicon or Intel.
Loading latest version…A Note From Brian
I've spent twenty-five years making video, and I still couldn't find a slideshow app I'd actually use. The easy ones shuffle your photos behind your back and export something soft and small. The powerful ones want you to build every slide by hand.
Kinora is my answer: drop in a folder and a finished show is playing in seconds, then every choice it made is yours to change. This is the first public release, so expect it to keep getting better.
Three Steps
Drop a folder
Kinora reads your photos, their dates, faces, and framing, and a finished show is playing before you've settled into your chair.
Make it yours
Pick a theme, add your music, spotlight the keepers, hide the misses, drag anything anywhere. Every edit survives every reshuffle.
Export
One button, and what you watched is exactly what you get, up to 4K at 60 fps.
Eighteen Themes, Honestly Previewed
Every theme in the gallery is rendered live with your photos, never a canned sample. Rest your pointer on a tile and it plays. Photo albums with turning pages, gallery walls you walk past, postcards that flip to their message side, film strips, projector reels, paper spreads, clean grids. Each one is its own little world, built photo-first.
Cuts That Land On The Beat
Add a song and Kinora finds its beats on your Mac, no cloud, no account. Cuts land just ahead of the beat the way editors cut by hand, pacing follows the music's energy, and the sync survives every edit you make. Playlists work too, and the show can loop the music or fit itself to it.
You're In Control
Kinora never reshuffles photos behind your back. Sort by date, name, or shuffle once with intention. And when the app has a suggestion (duplicate stacks collapsed, blurry utility shots hidden), it happens as one visible, undoable moment, never a silent rearrangement.
Spotlight a photo to hold it longer. Force one to fill the frame alone. Group a run of photos into a single moment with a sweep of the divider. Hide the misses with one click, set a focus point or crop, drop a text slide anywhere. It's all right on the filmstrip, and it all survives a reroll. Deal a fresh arrangement as many times as you like without losing a single decision.
What You Preview Is What You Export
Preview and export share one renderer, frame for frame. No washed-out colors, no mystery black backgrounds, no 2-megapixel surprises. The export is the preview, written to disk. H.264 and HEVC for sharing, ProRes for the edit bay. Widescreen, vertical, square, or portrait, with framing re-solved for each shape.
Built To Keep Your Shows
Archive a project into one plain folder, the show and byte-for-byte copies of every photo, that opens years from now, on this Mac or the next one. Even without Kinora, it's still just your pictures and a small text file.
No account. No subscription. No analytics. Photos and music are processed entirely on your Mac. The only network touches: optional title-card geocoding sends an approximate, city-scale location to Apple, and Kinora checks this site over HTTPS for updates. Photos are never copied or uploaded. Kinora works from your folders, right where they are.
Free. macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later, Apple Silicon or Intel. Notarized by Apple, about 25 MB.