How to Make a Funeral Slideshow (Without the USB Chaos)
To make a slideshow for a funeral, collect photos from family members into one shared folder (Google Drive or iCloud work fine), choose a simple tool like Google Photos, Apple Photos, Canva, or PowerPoint to arrange them, add a song or two that actually meant something to the person, and export the finished file to a laptop or TV you've already tested at the venue. That's the core of it. The rest of this article is about doing it without losing three days to chasing down USB drives, hunting for the cable that fits the church projector, and realizing at 11 p.m. the night before that your cousin's photos are in a format nothing will open.
The Real Problem: Photos Live in Seventeen Different Places
Someone has the baby pictures on an old hard drive. Someone else has the 1987 beach photos in a shoebox. Your brother has forty videos on his phone but no idea how to get them to you. Your aunt emailed three JPEGs at thumbnail size. This is the actual work of a funeral slideshow — not the software, not the music. It's the archaeology.
The fastest way through it is to stop asking people to send files and start giving them one place to drop them. A shared Google Drive folder with a simple name — "Photos for Dad" — and a link texted to the family group chat will get you further in two hours than a week of individual requests. Tell people: don't sort, don't edit, just upload whatever you have. You can curate later. You cannot curate photos that never arrive.
Choosing Your Tool (The Honest Version)
If you have a few hours and moderate comfort with technology
Canva has a free slideshow mode that's genuinely easy to use. You drag photos into a template, reorder them, drop in a title slide with the person's name and years, and export as a video or presentation. The learning curve is about thirty minutes if you've never used it.
If you have almost no time
Google Photos will auto-generate a movie from a folder of photos. It won't be perfect, but it will exist and it will play. Sometimes "exists and plays" is what the week calls for.
If someone in the family is comfortable with PowerPoint or Keynote
These are still the most reliable options for venue playback, especially if you're not sure what software the funeral home has. A .pptx file will open almost anywhere. Set slides to auto-advance every five or six seconds, embed the audio rather than linking to it, and save a second copy on a USB as a backup even if you plan to stream.
The Music Question
One or two songs is almost always enough. Three starts to feel long. Pick something that was actually his, not something that feels appropriately sad. The song he played too loud on Saturday mornings. The one that was on the radio the summer the family photo was taken. If you don't know, ask the person who knew him longest. They'll know immediately.
If you're streaming from a laptop, download the audio file locally. A buffering Spotify track at the wrong moment is the kind of thing people remember for years.
Slide Order: One Simple Structure That Works
- Opening title slide — name, birth year, death year, maybe a single favorite photo
- Early life — childhood, family of origin, young adulthood
- Middle years — career, marriage, kids, the decades that built the life
- Later years and recent photos — the face people in the room know best
- Closing slide — one image, one line. Her handwriting if you have it. A place that mattered to him.
Thirty to forty photos is usually the right length for a five-to-seven-minute slideshow. More than that and it starts to feel like you're waiting for it to end.
The Night-Before Checklist
- Play the whole slideshow start to finish on the device you're bringing
- Confirm the venue's display connection (HDMI? VGA? Do you need an adapter?)
- Have the file in at least two places — laptop and USB, or two different cloud accounts
- Set the screen to never sleep during playback
- Mute all notifications on the presentation device
After the Service, the Photos Deserve Somewhere to Live
The slideshow plays once. Then the folder sits in someone's Drive and the photos scatter again. If you want the collection to stay accessible — so the grandchildren can find it in ten years, so someone who couldn't make the service can still see it — a free digital memorial page at app.scan2remember.com gives you a place to upload the photos, add video, write the story in full, and let family leave notes over time. It's the same work you've already done, kept somewhere that doesn't depend on anyone remembering which folder it was in.
The slideshow is for the room. The memorial page is for everyone who comes after.