Dr. Patricia Caldwell(click for bio)

Embrance Ambassador

The Service Is in Two Days

Two days is enough. Not for everything you have been told to do, but for a slideshow that plays at the service and looks like the person, which is the entire job. Most of what takes time is optional. The part that is not takes an evening.

What is not enough is two days measured against the wrong date. Somewhere in front of the service there is a deadline nobody has mentioned to you yet, and finding it comes before you touch a single photograph.

The real deadline is earlier than you think

Say the service is Saturday. The slideshow is very unlikely to be due Saturday.

Funeral homes commonly stop accepting material for a tribute video some way ahead of the day, often by twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and once that point passes the file is closed. That is a working practice rather than a rule handed down from anywhere. It varies enough between one funeral home and the next that no general figure is worth acting on, and the person who can tell you is the director handling your service. Nobody else can.

There are two different deadlines hiding inside that, and which one is yours depends on who is assembling the video. If the funeral home is building it, what they need early is the photographs, and everything after that runs on their clock. If you are building it, what they need is a finished file with room left over to put it on their equipment before the day. Those two dates are rarely the same, and neither of them is the day of the service. Which arrangement you are actually in is worth being certain about rather than assuming, and whether to hand it over at all sets out what each way costs you.

You are probably reading this at an hour when nobody is going to pick up the phone. So write the questions down now, in a form you can read out in the morning without having to think:

• When is the last moment you can take it, and is that a date or a time of day?
• Would you rather have a file on a drive, a link, or the photographs themselves?
• When can I come in and watch it play on the screen in the room?

Three questions, one call. The time of day matters more than families expect. Thursday can mean the end of Thursday, or before the person who builds these leaves at two in the afternoon, and those are six hours apart in a week where you do not have six hours to spare.

Put the date of the service in below and it lays out what to do on each of the days between now and then. It plans the closing stretch rather than the whole run-up, which in your case is the same thing.

What to do first

Two things, and everything else waits behind them. Both of them depend on somebody else answering, which is why they go first.

Make the call. The three questions above, first thing, before you look at a photograph. The answer decides how much room you have, and there is no version of this week in which you would rather find that out later. If the day is split between two places, a church and a funeral home, or a graveside and a hall afterwards, ask which building has the screen, because that building's deadline is the one that belongs to you.

Send one message asking for photographs. Tonight, before you have decided anything, before you know what you are making, before you have even looked at what you already have. It is the only task on this page whose clock keeps running while you are asleep.

Two things make that message work much harder. The first is an hour instead of a day. "As soon as you can" comes back on Friday. "By six tomorrow evening, because I have to hand it in Thursday morning" comes back tomorrow evening, and the reason travels with it, so nobody has to guess whether you meant it. Set that hour earlier than your real cutoff and treat the gap as the buffer you will need for something else entirely.

The second is saying what happens to what they send, in that same message rather than in an awkward reply to somebody a week later. Who to include in a memorial slideshow has wording you can send more or less as it stands.

One more thing while the phone is in your hand, because it catches people out. The slideshow is often not the earliest deadline in the week. If the obituary is also yours, that one can be due before anything else, since a paper has its own cutoff and it is frequently within a day. There is a free obituary generator here, and a eulogy assistant beside it, both of which will hand you a draft in a few minutes if the blank screen is the thing stopping you.

What you can safely skip

Nearly everything written about making one of these, here included, was written for somebody with a week. Here is what you are allowed to put down.

Getting the order exactly right. Sorting to the year is an evening. Sorting to roughly the right stretch of a life is twenty minutes. The difference is not visible from a seat in the fourth row, and you need that evening for something else. Three loose piles, early and middle and recent, will carry a slideshow perfectly well. If the folder is large and nothing in it carries a usable date, there is a way to order it by eye in sorting hundreds of undated photos, and the twenty-minute version of it is all you need this week.

A scanner. Not for anything going on a screen, and not this week. A phone at a window will copy a stack of prints in an evening and the copies will hold up on a large screen, which is what photographing old prints with your phone is for. That page is honest about the two cases where a scanner really is the better tool, a small print you want enlarged for a frame and a fragile one that should only be handled once, and neither of those is a job that has to happen before Saturday. Skip the prints that fight you, as well: anything glued into an album, anything brittle, anything sealed behind glass in a frame that will not open. Skip the drive to the print shop too, because it costs a round trip and a turnaround nobody has quoted you.

Reaching a photo count. The numbers in every guide, ours among them, describe a comfortable slideshow rather than a required one. You do not have to reach forty, and you are not doing better by getting to eighty. Use what you actually have and let the length follow from that. How long a funeral slideshow should be has the arithmetic for when you want it, and midnight two days out is not when you want it.

A second version for the visitation. The two showings do pull in different directions, and in an ordinary week building both is worth the extra half hour. This is not an ordinary week. Make the one cut for the seats and play that same file in the hall afterwards. The part of one slideshow for the service, one for the visitation worth five minutes tonight is the list of what to cut, which works a category at a time rather than one photograph at a time and is much faster than choosing from scratch.

Chasing the last few relatives. Ask once, ask everybody at the same time, then stop. Somebody who has not replied by tomorrow morning is not sitting on the photograph that would have transformed it. They are having the same week you are having. Do give the finished set one look for anyone genuinely central who has vanished from it, because that is worth a minute. Four more messages are not.

A song for every chapter. One song will carry a short slideshow and two or three will carry almost any of them, which is where a slideshow the room sits and watches nearly always lands anyway once you divide the photographs by the length of a song. What costs you an evening is the lovely idea that the music should change as the decades change, and the counting and cutting that goes with it. If there is one recording nothing else can stand in for, using your own songs covers how a file gets in. Otherwise take whatever gentle instrumental music the tool hands you and never think about it again.

Comparing tools for hours. If you are going to compare, compare once, in one place, for ten minutes, then commit. The expensive version of this evening is opening six free trials at half past eleven and going to bed having made nothing. Our comparison of memorial slideshow makers is the ten-minute version, and it says plainly where something other than us is the better answer.

Working out what happens to it afterwards. People will ask for a copy, some of them before you have left the car park. It is genuinely a next-week problem, and how to share a memorial slideshow afterwards is waiting when it becomes one. Nothing you do now makes that harder, as long as you keep the file.

Editing the pictures themselves. Straightening, brightening, cropping somebody out of the corner. Nobody in that room is assessing composition. Every minute spent improving one photograph is a minute not spent on the twenty that are not in yet.

And one that is not really a skip, but is worth naming out loud, because it is coming. At some point tonight a photograph will come up and you will be gone for twenty minutes. That is not wasted time and you should not try to prevent it. What you can skip is doing it deliberately, three hundred times, one file at a time. Choose quickly, and let the few that stop you stop you.

What genuinely cannot be rushed

Being honest about the limits is more useful than pretending the whole week compresses evenly. Three things do not.

Other people. The gap between your message and their reply belongs to them. Naming an hour and saying why shortens it a little. Nothing shortens it past the fact that your cousin is asleep and will look at her phone at seven. That is the entire reason the asking goes first, ahead of any decision about the slideshow itself. Everything else on this page is work you can do quickly, alone, in the middle of the night. That one is not.

Watching it play in the room where it will play. Five minutes of somebody's time, but only inside a window you do not control. The building has opening hours. The chapel may be in use. The person who runs the screen may not be in on a Sunday, and on the day before yours may be at two other services. So book that window during the same call where you ask about the deadline. The file will be finished when you decide it is. Their week will not move for you.

Anything built by somebody else. If your first thought reading this was that you would rather hand the whole thing over, that is a real option with an honest limit. Our own done-for-you slideshow begins gathering photographs the moment you ask, and we deliberately publish no turnaround figure, because two days is genuinely tight for it. Put your service date in the first message. If it is too tight to do properly you will be told so straight away, and you want that tonight rather than on Friday.

One conditional, since it changes the shape of the day rather than the length of it. Where a service includes military funeral honors, the detail arrives in a slot fixed by other people, and the rest of the day is arranged around it. That can also change where in the day a screen exists at all. Making a memorial slideshow for a veteran goes through it, and the thing to establish this week is which part of the day has a room and a screen in it.

If it is tomorrow

Then this is the version where you give things up on purpose, which is far better than running out of time and losing them at random.

1. Call the moment they open and ask for the latest hour they can take it. Everything below bends around that answer.
2. Stop gathering. Whatever has already arrived is the set. Do not open another album, do not send another message, do not wait on anyone.
3. Choose in a single pass. Go through once, keep what stops you, and do not go back to reconsider. The set you pick in one pass is better than the set you agonize over in three.
4. Three piles. Early, middle, recent. That is the order. It is enough.
5. One song, or the instrumental music that comes with whatever you are building in. Do not go looking for a file you are not sure exists.
6. Watch it through once, start to finish, sound on. The only step that cannot be dropped, because it is the one that catches the wrong name, the duplicate, and the picture you did not mean to include.
7. Take two copies in, early. The file on a drive, and the same file on your phone. Ask them to play it while you are standing there.

If the real deadline turns out to be further off than you thought, the unhurried version of all this is how to make a funeral slideshow, which assumes an evening rather than an hour.

And whichever of those two you are in: what plays on the day will be enough. Not because standards are lower for a slideshow made in a hurry, but because the room is not there to review a film. They are there to see a face they knew, and you are the person who found it for them in a week when finding anything was hard.

Frequently Asked Questions

How fast can you make a funeral slideshow?

The building is the short part. Once the photographs are in one place, putting them in order, adding music, and watching it through takes an evening, and less if you use a tool that arranges them for you rather than an editor you have to learn. Gathering is what takes the days, because it depends on other people replying. If the photographs are already on your phone, a finished slideshow in an hour or two is realistic. On Embrance the live preview is free and assembles as you add photographs, so you can find out tonight whether the route works before paying for anything, and after checkout the downloadable file arrives by email a few minutes later.

When does the funeral home need the slideshow?

Earlier than the service, and asking is the only way to know by how much. Many funeral homes stop accepting material a day or two ahead so there is time to build and check it, but that is local practice rather than an industry rule, and it differs enough between homes that a general answer is no use to you. Two dates are involved, so be clear which one you are being given. If they are assembling the video, the deadline is when they need your photographs. If you are building it, the deadline is when they need the finished file, which should leave room to test it on their screen. Ask for a time of day as well as a date, because the end of a working day and the middle of one are hours apart.

What is the minimum number of photos for a memorial slideshow?

There is no floor, and hunting for one costs you time you do not have. Twenty-five photographs of the right person make a better slideshow than eighty that nobody chose, and a room watching a short one does not experience it as a shortfall. Use everything good that you have, up to whatever slot the funeral director has given you. What to avoid is the opposite move, padding the count with near-duplicates and blurred frames to reach a figure you read somewhere, since that is the one thing a seated room does notice. Choose for the person, not for the total.

Can you make a memorial slideshow the night before?

Yes, and plenty of families do, but go in knowing what the last night costs. You lose the chance to play it on the funeral home's equipment beforehand, which is the most useful thing five minutes can buy you, and you lose anyone whose photographs have not arrived yet. So work only with what you already have, keep it short, and watch it through once from beginning to end before you close the laptop. Then arrive early enough to hand it over and see it play before people are in their seats, and bring it on two things rather than one. If the file is not started, that is not the moment to compare tools. Pick one and finish.