Three to five minutes if it plays during the service. That is the length of one song, and it is what a room can watch together without shifting in its seats.

If that is all you needed, you can stop reading. The rest of this explains where the number comes from, what changes it, and what to do when your photographs and your song disagree.

Why three to five minutes

A funeral service runs on a rhythm the funeral director has built with you: readings, music, a eulogy, a moment of reflection. The slideshow is one item in that sequence, not the sequence itself.

Three to five minutes is the length of a single song. It gives the room one arc with a beginning and an end, and it sits inside the service without displacing anything else.

You will find advice online recommending ten or fifteen minutes. That advice is not wrong, it is written for a different situation: a slideshow looping quietly in a corner while people arrive or eat. In a service, with everyone facing a screen in silence, ten minutes is a very long time.

It depends where it plays

The single most useful thing you can do is ask the funeral director which of these they usually do at that venue. They will have an opinion, it takes one question, and it settles the length before you start.

How many photographs that allows

Each photograph needs three to four seconds on screen. Less than three and the room cannot take it in. More than four and it starts to drag, particularly on a single portrait.

Two adjustments in practice. Group photographs need five or six seconds rather than three, because people are looking for a particular face rather than at one. Any slide carrying a name, a date or a dedication needs the same, because people are reading rather than looking.

So if your slideshow opens with a title card and includes a handful of group shots, take five or ten off the count.

Let the song decide

The cleanest way to settle the length is to choose the song first and let its running time set everything else.

A song of two minutes twenty holds around forty photographs. A song of five minutes holds around ninety. Once the track is chosen, the photograph count is largely decided for you, and you are choosing which images earn a place rather than arguing about duration in the abstract.

Check the running time on your own file rather than trusting a list. A remaster, a live recording or a later reissue can run a minute longer than the version you remember.

When the photographs and the song disagree

This happens constantly. You have ninety photographs you cannot bear to cut and a song that holds sixty.

Cut to the song. The least popular option and usually the right one. Ninety photographs at two seconds each is a slideshow nobody can follow. Sixty the room can actually see is a better tribute than ninety it cannot.

Find a longer recording of the same song. Live versions and extended arrangements often run a minute or two longer, and the association with the melody is unchanged.

Add a second song. This buys real time, and it works as long as the photographs change where the songs change. What does not work is a second track starting mid sequence: the room hears the join and reads it as a mistake.

What to avoid is speeding the photographs up to fit. Below three seconds an image stops registering, and a room watching a fast slideshow feels hurried at exactly the moment it should not.

A short answer, again

Three to five minutes in the service. Longer only if it loops somewhere people are moving around. Three to four seconds a photograph. Choose the song first and most of this decides itself.

If you would rather not work any of this out, send us the photographs and the song. We set the pacing from the length of the track and send the finished video back in minutes.

Read next

Funeral slideshow: photos, length and music

Songs for a funeral slideshow, and how many photos each holds

How to collect photos for a funeral slideshow