Every time I add a picture Magix puts it in for 10 seconds. I have 162 pictures to add to my video. Is there a way I can make them automatically adjust?
Yes. Press on Y to go to Program Settings, under the Video/Audio tab, change the Standard picture length to what you want. The default should have been 7 seconds, not 10.
If you have already put some photos on the timeline, select one, right click, Change photo length, change the counter which is in minutes:seconds:frames to what you want (I use 3 or 4 seconds), click on Apply to all, done.
If you have or want transitions, you can do the same thing, click (not right-click) on the first transition, Set transition length, change the length, Apply to all. I often use a short cross-fade transition of a few frames as I find the hard cut from one image or video to another to be quite jarring; a very short transition smooths things out. If you do use effects transitions, use them sparingly and don't use the same transition for the 162 photos; this becomes monotonous. A friend used a zoom transition for 50 photos. The zoom was automatic so the photos were all zoomed the same way and usually zoomed on nothing of importance. I use an effect transition when there is a change of subject or when two photos or video clips show much the same thing but I need to show that there is something different.
I suggest that you watch my tutorials on Basic Editing in MEP to get familiar with the main tools.
It is well worth while playing with the Slide show maker feature if you want some random effects. It seems very intuitive when applying zooms to photos as it automatically seems to find the main feature of the shot. It deals with Portrait pictures in novel ways too. You can easily specify the type and level of effects and transitions also.
The Slide Show Maker is a very good tool to automatically make transition and photo effects. But bear in mind that it will change the time to display your photo. What I always do, after applying the Slide Show Maker, is go into the photo-mode timeline, and then adjust one photo to the required seconds and set "apply to all". Same also to transitions, just to have a constant transition time rate.
Good tip @wongck but does it adjust the timing of dynamic effects like pans and zooms to compensate. I imagine it would because the default with most Key framed effects is "adjust effect to object length".
Yes, panning and zooms rates will be different when you re-time the time of photos after the wizard. Especially those that "shows different part of the photo by panning and zooming" and takes much longer, I normally will remove such "longish" effects.