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Step by step
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A real example
made with Tailor Chapters
How it works
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Step one: decide when it plays
Do this before anything else, because it sets the length and the length sets everything else.
During the service means three to five minutes, one song, and a room watching together. As people arrive, or at the reception afterwards, means a longer loop where nobody watches end to end.
Ask the funeral director which they usually do at that venue. They will have an opinion and it is generally the right one.
Step two: gather the photographs
Ask three or four relatives directly rather than messaging everyone. A group of twenty produces duplicates and people who assume someone else has it covered.
Pick them for the parts of the life you cannot cover yourself. A sibling has the childhood, a colleague has the working years, a grandchild has the last decade in better quality than anyone.
Give each one the same brief: five to ten photographs, the ones they would keep if they could only keep a few. Set a named deadline, because a soft one produces photographs that arrive after the funeral.
Printed photographs do not need a scanner. Lay them flat near a window, hold the phone parallel, turn the flash off. At the size a screen shows, that is indistinguishable from a scan.
Step three: choose the song
One song is enough for a slideshow inside a service.
The songs that land are the ones the person actually listened to. Length matters as much as feeling: a two minute twenty track holds around forty photographs, a four minute track around seventy.
Read the lyrics again before committing. A line can land very differently in a room in mourning than it does on a car radio.
Step four: put them in order
Chronological, because the room already knows how to follow it. Start with the earliest photograph and move forward.
Two adjustments are worth making. Open on the photograph that looks most like them, the one people picture when they think of them, even if it sits in the middle. And close on something warm rather than something recent, since recent photographs are often from the illness rather than the life.
Sort into decades first, not into good and bad. Sorting by quality invites a conversation about every picture and is where afternoons disappear.
Step five: set the pace and export
Three to four seconds per photograph. Five or six for group shots and for any slide carrying text, because people are reading.
Keep transitions plain. A simple cut or a soft fade disappears; anything more elaborate pulls attention to the software rather than the person.
Export as MP4 at 1080p. Keep the file under a couple of gigabytes so it copies quickly and does not bounce out of an email.
Step six: make sure it will play
Ask the funeral director how they want the file and whether they play it from their equipment or yours.
Bring it on a USB stick formatted exFAT, file in the root, clearly named, and bring a second copy. Sticks fail on the day rather than the day before.
Test the first thirty seconds and the last thirty seconds on the venue equipment if you can. The end is where an incorrect export reveals itself and it is the part nobody checks.
Agree who presses play, and make sure it is not the person about to speak.
Or hand it over
Steps two and three are the only ones that need the family. The rest is work, and it is the wrong work for that week.
Send us the photographs and the song and the finished slideshow comes back in minutes, as an MP4 you keep.
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
Questions
€19.90
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€4.98
one video · unlimited photos
Free unlimited tweaks & re-generations until you love it. Not happy? Full refund.
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