I don’t do a whole lot of video work, but I do throw together quick videos for friends and family. Sometimes editing in iMovie, as simple as it is, is overkill for my needs. That’s why I appreciate simple little apps like Glimpses (formerly known as Briefly) from Eternal Storms Software.
Glimpses’ sole purpose is to quickly and easily create high-quality video montages—dozens, or even hundreds of photos flashing by for fractions of a second, set to music—like the one you see above. Now keep in mind that I paid no attention to the size, shape or resolution of the photos I chose—so don’t judge Glimpses by what you see in the video.
Working with Glimpses
Glimpses couldn’t be easier to use. You simply add a whole bunch of photos to the main window by selecting them from your Photos app collection, dragging from the Finder, or importing them from Flickr or Instagram. Once the photos are in the editing window, you can re-order them any way you wish, including: manually, by date, title or color (a very slick feature).
Once your photos are in order, you choose a soundtrack and set the duration you wish your photos to appear. You can choose anywhere from 0.1 to 4 seconds, or you can let Glimpses figure it out based on the length of your soundtrack. If you set the duration yourself, the soundtrack will fade out when all the photos have been displayed (like the video above). If your soundtrack is too short for the number of photos you have, you can add additional soundtracks, or loop it.
When you’re done, you simply export the video at the resolution you want, ranging from 240p all the way up to 4K. You can also have Glimpses remove any pillars and letter-boxing. But the coolest thing is that Glimpses recognizes faces, and moves the photos to keep them in the frame.
Shortcomings
I almost hesitate to call it shortcoming, but the one thing that bothered me was the inability to set any particular photo duration independently of the rest of them. For instance, it would be cool to have the first photo stay up for a second or two while leaving the rest of them set to half a second (or whatever).
You can get around this by placing duplicate photos in the editing window. So if you have your photo duration set to half a second, but you want the first one to stay on screen for five seconds, you simply have to have 10 copies of the photo set to appear in a row. It’s a bit of a pain, but not too difficult to work with. I’ve been in touch with Matthias Gansrigler at Eternal Storms and he tells me that he’s well aware of this limitation, and hopes to address it in a future release if possible.
In conclusion
I really love this little app, it works as advertised and doesn’t try to do too much. I’ve already used Glimpses to create a video greeting card for family, and a product intro video for a client. They were extremely pleased with the quality and speed with which I was able to put it together.
Glimpses requires Mac OS X Yosemite and costs just $24.99 (Mac App Store link). A 15-day demo version is available on the Glimpses product page. If you find iMovie to be overkill for producing montage videos, I highly recommend you give Glimpses a try.