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Funeral slideshow
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What a funeral slideshow is
It goes by several names, and they all describe the same thing: a funeral slideshow, a memorial video, a tribute video, a photo montage. Funeral directors tend to say tribute video. Families tend to say slideshow.
It usually runs at one of three moments: as people arrive and take their seats, as a set piece in the middle of the service, or on a loop during the reception afterwards. Which moment you choose changes the length, and that is the one decision worth making before anything else.
How long should a funeral slideshow be
Between three and five minutes, if it plays inside the service. That is the length of one song, and it is what a room can hold without shifting in its seats.
As people arrive, five to eight minutes works, because it can loop without anyone noticing the seam. At the reception, eight minutes or more is fine, since people come and go and length stops mattering.
You will find advice online recommending ten to fifteen minutes. That advice is written for a slideshow playing quietly in a corner, not for one the whole room is watching. In a service, a ten minute slideshow is a long time to sit in silence.
The simplest way to decide: pick the song first, and let its length set yours.
How many photos to use
Between 45 and 75 for a slideshow that runs inside the service.
The arithmetic is straightforward. Each photograph needs three to four seconds on screen: long enough to recognise a face, short enough not to stall. Group photographs and any slide carrying text need longer, closer to five or six seconds, because people are reading rather than looking.
Three minutes holds 45 to 60 photographs. Four minutes holds 60 to 80. Five minutes holds 75 to 100.
The number that matters more than the total is the pace. A hundred and fifty photographs squeezed into four minutes gives each one under two seconds, and the room sees a flicker rather than a life. Fewer photographs, held longer, is almost always the better film.
What order to put them in
Chronological works, and it works because the room already knows how to follow it. Start with the earliest photograph you have and move forward.
Two adjustments are worth making to a strict chronology. Open on a photograph where the person looks like themselves, the one the room pictures when they think of them, even if it sits in the middle of the timeline. And close on something warm rather than something recent, since the most recent photographs are often from the illness rather than the life.
If chronology is impossible because the early photographs do not exist, group by the parts of the life instead: family, work, the thing they did every weekend.
Choosing the music
The song does more work than any individual photograph. It sets the pace, it sets the tone, and it decides the length.
Length is a constraint, not a detail. A song of two minutes twenty holds around 40 photographs. A song of four minutes holds around 70. Choose the song, and the photograph count is largely decided for you.
Their taste beats the obvious choice. The songs that land are the ones the person actually listened to. A track that was played in their kitchen for thirty years will do more than a hymn nobody associated with them.
If the lyrics of a favourite song are too much for the family to sit through, the instrumental version of the same piece keeps the association without the words.
How to make a funeral slideshow
Gather the photos. Ask two or three relatives to send theirs rather than searching alone. Photographs from before your own memory of the person are usually the ones the room has never seen. Printed photographs can be photographed with a phone on a flat surface near a window, which is faster than scanning and good enough at the size a screen shows.
Pick the song. One song is enough for a slideshow inside a service. Two only if you are running longer, and then change the photographs at the point the songs change, so the join reads as intentional.
Put it together. Order the photographs, set each to three or four seconds, keep the transitions plain, and export as an MP4. Check with the funeral director which format and which cable the venue takes. This is the point where most families discover the venue plays from a USB stick and not from a phone.
If you would rather not make it yourself
Most of the tools that rank for this search are editors. They give you a template and a timeline, and you do the work.
We are not an editor. You send us your photographs and the song you have chosen, and we send back the finished video. There is no timeline to learn and no template to fill in. It is ready in minutes rather than days, which matters when the service is on Thursday.
You keep the file. You can play it at the service, share it with family who could not travel, and keep it afterwards.
Tailor Chapters is part of Tailor Tune, which holds a 4.97 out of 5 rating across 61 customer reviews.
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What you’ll need
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Your own photos — JPG, PNG or HEIC
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A song you love — MP3, WAV or M4A
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That’s it — we handle the editing
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