Dr. Patricia Caldwell(click for bio)

Embrance Ambassador

One Slideshow for the Service, One for the Visitation

Almost every family plans one video. There is a folder of photographs, there is a week, and at the end of it there is a file on a drive, and that file is expected to do the whole job.

There are usually two jobs. The showing during the service and the showing at the visitation or the reception afterward happen in rooms that have very little in common, and the two rooms want opposite things. The one people sit down and watch should be short. The one playing next to the coffee urn should be as long as you can make it. Get that the wrong way round and you either throw away half the folder to build something that had room for all of it, or hand the funeral director twenty minutes of film for a six-minute slot.

The second version is not a second project, which is worth knowing at the start. It is the first one with things taken out, about a quarter of an hour's work once the folder is in order. What matters is which one you build first.

The two rooms are not the same

Picture the service, in the shape a good many of them take. The seats all face one direction. Somebody dims the lights, there is a shuffle and a settling, and then everyone in the building is looking at the same rectangle at the same moment. It falls at a fixed point between two other items, in a slot somebody else decided. The room is usually quiet for it, and mostly nobody arrives in the middle. It begins, it ends, and the room comes back.

Plenty of services are not shaped like that, and it is worth saying so before the rest of this rests on it. A home-going service where the congregation answers back, a graveside committal, a vigil that runs for hours while people come and go: those have far more in common with the room described next than with this one. If that is your day, the second of these two rooms is the one to build for.

Now the visitation, the wake, or the hall afterward. There are no rows. People are standing up, holding a cup or a plate, doing the hardest small talk of their lives with relatives they last saw at a wedding. There is food along one wall and a line near the door. The screen is generally a television on a stand in a corner or out in the lobby, at about head height, with the lights on and daylight through a window, and the sound is often turned down to nothing because eighty people are trying to hear each other.

Nobody in that second room watches the slideshow. They glance at it. They stop in front of it for half a minute on the way back from the tea, say something about somebody's hair, and move off. Then twenty minutes later they drift past it again. That is not inattention. It is what a visitation is, and the screen is doing a different job there: it is not holding the room, it is giving people somewhere to stand and something to say to one another.

The service version wants to be tight

Everything about a seated room argues for less.

The attention is genuine, which means the flaws are visible too. In a quiet room facing one way, a soft photograph or the third nearly identical frame of the same pose is seen by everybody. Nobody will mention it. But a room feels the difference between a film that keeps moving and one with a flat stretch in the middle, and that stretch is almost always a run of pictures from the same afternoon.

There is also a clock, and it does not belong to you. Ask the funeral director how long the slot is before you build anything at all. Where a service has a defined gap between two other items, a film that runs past it leaves the family sitting in front of a screen while somebody at the back decides whether to stop it, which is a small, avoidable indignity in a day that has enough of them.

The deeper reason is that a seated room gets one pass. A photograph that needed a second look does not get one, and a face somebody almost placed is gone. That is the real case for trimming, and it has nothing to do with anyone's patience. It is that in a single pass every photograph has to earn its place against the one before it, and a near-copy of something two slides back cannot. Take those out and what remains arrives to a room that is still fully present. For how a slot in minutes turns into a photo count, the arithmetic is in how long a funeral slideshow should be.

The visitation version wants to be long

Run the same reasoning in the room where nobody is sitting and it comes out backwards.

A short film in a standing room repeats, and it is worth saying how that feels rather than how it looks on paper. Somebody stands near the screen talking to a cousin they have not seen in nine years, for twenty-five minutes, which at a visitation is ordinary. Behind them it has come round more than once, and at some point one of them looks up and says they have seen this bit. Nothing is ruined. But the screen has quietly stopped being a life and become a loop, and everyone in that corner now knows how long it is.

A long one never gets found out. Nobody is there for a full pass, so nobody learns where it ends, and every time somebody glances over there is a face they have not met yet. Length is not something you are getting away with in that room. It is the thing that makes it work.

The inversion goes further than length: the standing room can carry photographs the seated room cannot.

In the service, nobody can ask. A group shot with eleven people in it goes past, three of them are recognized, and everyone else spends six seconds working out which one he is. A picture of a shopfront, a boat, a certificate on a wall, means the world to two people in the building and nothing at all to the rest, and there is no way for anybody to say so.

At a visitation, saying so out loud is the entire point. That is the room where a daughter turns to somebody she has just met and says that was the shop, he had it thirty years, and now the two of them are talking. Photographs that need explaining are not dead weight there. They are the ones that start conversations, and often exactly the ones you took out of the short version an hour earlier.

Two things follow from the room rather than the length. Ask whether the screen in the gathering space will have sound at all, because it is frequently muted so people can hear each other, and a film built to land on a particular song will not land on anything if it is. Our guide to using your own songs is worth reading with that in mind. And a television in a lit room, seen at an angle from eight feet back, shows far less than a projector in the dark: small faces in a crowd, handwriting, anything with words in it will not read there.

The calculator below has a switch for which room you are building for. Set it to the way yours will be shown and it works the rest out.

What to cut for the short one

Work downward from the long version rather than choosing from scratch. It goes faster, because each pass is a category rather than a hundred separate judgments.

Start with the near-duplicates. Three frames of the same pose taken twenty seconds apart, because somebody blinked. Keep the one where the eyes are open and the hands are doing something. This is normally the largest cut available to you and the cheapest: nobody has ever missed a photograph they were never going to see beside its twin.

Then the long tail of one era. Nearly every folder has a stretch that is wildly overrepresented, because that was the year somebody bought a camera, or the trip everyone documented. Fourteen pictures of the same week at the coast reads on screen as a film that got stuck. Take the best two or three and leave the rest in the long version, where a ramble through one summer is a pleasure rather than a hold-up.

Then the ones that need explaining. The group shots where you would have to name everybody, the places only the family recognizes, the private jokes. In a silent room they are dead air. At the visitation they are the best thing on the screen, so this is a move rather than a deletion.

Then anything that has to be read. A newspaper notice, a handwritten letter, a certificate with an inscription. Six seconds is not enough to read something and take anything from it, and the room ends up doing homework instead of remembering. If a document matters, set a printed copy on the table by the guest book, where somebody can read it properly.

One thing not to cut: the ordinary ones. Under pressure the instinct is to keep what looks best, which quietly means keeping the portraits and dropping the blurry one at the kitchen table where somebody is laughing with their mouth full. That blurry one is frequently the picture the room remembers for years. Cut for repetition and for legibility, never for polish.

Building both from one set

You are not making two slideshows. You are making one and taking things out of it, and the order is the whole trick.

Build the long one first. Put in everything you have, in the rough order of the life, and stop. That is the visitation version, finished. If nothing in the folder carries a reliable date, sorting hundreds of undated photos is a method for doing that by eye in a single evening.

Then save a copy and cut that down. Because the short version is a subset of the long one in the same sequence, it needs no ordering of its own: removing a photograph never disturbs the ones on either side. Do it the other way round, building the tight one first and expanding it after, and you are back to sorting, because every photograph you add has to be placed by hand.

There is a quieter benefit to that order: plenty of people go to both, and somebody who stood beside the screen in the hall and then sat down for the service sees the same faces come back, tightened, rather than a different film about the same person.

Two practical notes. Music is the one part that does not carry over, since a long film wants more of it, or none at all if that screen turns out to be muted. And name the two files so nobody can play the wrong one: the person loading it has never met your family and will click whatever is on the drive. SERVICE 6 MIN and VISITATION 30 MIN in the file names removes a whole category of things that go wrong at ten past eleven.

If the funeral home is assembling the video, what usually comes back is one file, built to whatever photo cap that home works to. Caps and practice differ enormously between funeral homes, so plan around the number yours quotes rather than any general figure, and ask for it early. Where there is a cap, it is a better argument for building it yourself than most of the usual ones, since the second version costs almost nothing once the folder exists and nobody else will make it. Our guide on whether to let the funeral home make it covers the rest.

If you only make one

A great many families cannot do two, for entirely good reasons, and there is a clean answer.

Make the trimmed one.

However you get there, and gathering everything first and cutting down is the easier route by far, the file you finish with should be the one cut for the seats. Not because it is the better film, but because of what happens when each ends up in the wrong room. A short slideshow looping at a visitation is imperfect: it comes round, a few people notice, and that is the end of it. A long one dropped into a service slot is a real problem, because it either overruns something another person scheduled or gets stopped partway through, and both are remembered.

So build the one that survives being in the wrong place. Cut it for the seats, hand it over, and let it loop in the hall as well. If an hour turns up later in the week, a longer copy with the rest of the photographs back in is a bonus rather than the plan.

The exception is when there is no seated viewing at all. Some celebrations of life are purely a gathering: a hall, food, people moving around all afternoon, no order of service and no moment when everybody sits down together. If that is the shape of the day, there is no slot to protect and no tight version to build. Put everything in.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need two slideshows for a funeral?

You do not need two, and plenty of families are glad with one. It is worth knowing that the two showings pull in opposite directions, because the version a seated room watches should be trimmed and the one looping while people stand and talk should not be. If you are making only one, let the file you finish with be the trimmed one: gather everything, then cut it down for the seats. A short film loops acceptably at a visitation, while a long one does not fit a service slot. The second version is not a second project anyway. It is the same photographs, exported twice.

How long should a visitation slideshow be?

There is no target runtime, and hunting for one is what sends families wrong here. What matters is not the length of the film but how long one person lingers near the screen, and that varies so much with the family, the room and the length of the visitation that no general figure is worth much. It can easily be long enough for a whole conversation. The further your film runs past that, the fewer people see it come round, which is the whole aim, so in practice you use every photograph you have and trim nothing. If they add up to less than you hoped, that is still fine: a repeat costs very little in a room where nobody is watching from the start.

Can the same slideshow play at the service and the reception?

Yes. One file can cover both, and plenty of families do it that way. It works best when the film was built for the seated room, because a tight version loops at a reception without anything going wrong beyond a little repetition. The reverse does not hold: a long film will overrun the service slot or be stopped partway through. So if one file must cover both, make it the short one. If you can manage two, keep the trimmed cut for the service and let the full-length version run in the hall.

What is the difference between a visitation and a service slideshow?

The room, and everything that follows from it. At a service people are usually seated, facing one way, in a dimmed room with the sound up, watching a single pass in a fixed slot, so the film should be short, clear at a glance, and free of anything repetitive. At a visitation people are standing, talking, holding a plate, and glancing over now and then at a television in a lit corner that is often muted, so it should run long enough that few people see it come round, and it can carry the pictures that need somebody standing there to explain them. One is watched. The other is glanced at, and works more as a conversation starter than a film.