USER GUIDE
Slideshows V2
The new slideshow builder: pick a size once, drag your photos straight into slides shaped exactly like your slideshow, and the system takes care of resizing and compressing every image for a fast website. No photo editing skills needed.
Before you begin
Have your photos handy as JPG, PNG, or WEBP files, up to 40 MB each. That covers photos straight from a phone or camera — you do not need to resize, crop, or compress anything first. The slideshow does that for you.
Know where the slideshow will live: a full-width home page banner or a smaller department page banner. You will choose the size first, and the size cannot be changed later — a different spot on the site usually means a new slideshow.
Looking for the classic slideshow tool? That guide is still at Slideshows. New slideshows should be built here in Slideshows V2.
Everything happens in one place: Left menu › Slideshows V2. You will create a slideshow, drop photos in, tidy them up, and hand the finished slideshow to whoever manages your page layouts.
1 Create the slideshow and pick a size
Go to Left menu › Slideshows V2 and click New Slideshow. Give it a title you will recognize later (for example “Home Page Slideshow”), then pick a size card. Each card shows the true shape of the slideshow:
| Size | Best for |
|---|---|
| 1920 × 600 | Short home page slideshow |
| 1920 × 700 | Medium home page slideshow |
| 1920 × 800 | Tall home page slideshow |
| 1920 × 1080 | Extra-large, full-page slideshow |
| 900 × 400 | Department page slideshow |
| Custom | Enter your own width and height (up to 1920 pixels wide) |
Click Create & Add Slides. The size is now locked in — it shapes every slide you add, so what you see while editing is exactly what visitors will see.
2 Add photos
You will see a large dashed box shaped like your slideshow that says “Drag your image here”. There are three ways to fill it:
Drag and drop. Drag one photo — or several at once — from your computer onto the box. Each photo becomes a slide.
Choose a file. Click choose a file from your computer to browse for photos instead of dragging.
Use the Media Library. Click select it from the Media Library to pick a photo already on your website. The slideshow makes its own copy, so your slideshow keeps working even if the original file is moved or deleted later.
As each photo uploads, the slideshow automatically resizes and compresses it to fit. A 6 MB photo from your phone becomes a fast, web-ready image without you doing anything.
3 Reposition a photo (drag up or down)
Tall photos — like portrait shots from a phone — will not fit a wide slideshow top-to-bottom, so the slideshow shows the widest part and lets you choose which part. Hover over a slide and you will see “Drag up or down to reposition”. Drag the photo until the part you care about — faces, a building, the horizon — sits in view. Your choice is saved automatically.
4 Slide details: alt text, titles, buttons
Next to each slide is a small panel of details:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Alt text | A short description of the photo for visitors using screen readers — for example “City Hall at sunset”. Please fill this in on every slide; it is an important part of an accessible (ADA-friendly) website. |
| Title shown on slide | Optional large text shown on top of the photo — for example “Welcome to Our City”. A soft shadow is added automatically so the text stays readable over any photo. |
| Title & button position | A small grid of five spots: center or any corner. The title and buttons move together as one block. |
| Buttons (up to 4) | Optional buttons under the title — for example “Pay a Bill” linking to your payments page. Give each one its text and a link. |
| Link | Optional. Makes the whole photo clickable, sending visitors to a page you choose. |
| Photo credit | Optional. Shows a small credit line in the corner of the slide — nice for photo contest winners and local photographers. |
| Show this slide | Uncheck to hide a slide from the website without deleting it — handy for seasonal photos. |
Use the up and down arrows on each slide to change the order, and the trash can to remove a slide.
5 Slideshow settings
Click Settings at the top of the editor to adjust how the slideshow plays: autoplay on or off, seconds per slide, the transition style (fade or slide), and whether visitors see arrows and dots for moving between slides.
6 Putting it on your website
Building the slideshow and placing it on a page are two separate jobs, and placing is usually handled by whoever manages your site design:
Design staff use the Widget Builder (Slideshow V2) to style the slideshow’s frame — arrows, dots, title fonts, button colors — and paste it into a page template.
Everyday editors can place a slideshow themselves if the designer has published it as a component: in the Page Editor, click Insert Component and pick it from the list. See Inserting Components.
Either way, the photos stay editable right here in Slideshows V2 — change a photo or reorder slides and every page showing that slideshow updates automatically.
Where your photos are stored
Each slideshow gets its own folder in the Media Library, under the Application Folders tab. These folders are managed for you: the slideshow keeps its files organized there, and they cannot be renamed, moved, or deleted by hand — so a slideshow can never break because a file was tidied away. You never need to open this folder, but it is there if you want to grab a photo’s link.
Next steps
Add your best photos, fill in the alt text, and let your design contact know the slideshow is ready to place. From there, explore Photo Galleries for grid-style photo collections, or News Posts to pair your new banner with fresh announcements.