How Many Photos Do You Need for a Memorial Video?
A Gathering Checklist

For a 4 to 6 minute memorial film, 20 to 40 photographs is the sweet spot. At a pace that lets a room actually look, each image holds the screen for six to nine seconds. Thirty photos with that much room to breathe is a film. Sixty photos at three seconds each is a slideshow, and somewhere in the middle of it people stop watching. If the service also carries readings, a eulogy, and music, aim at the lower end: 24 well-chosen images hold more than 50 unsorted ones. What matters more than the count is the spread. Ten photographs from one well-documented decade leaves most of a life off screen. Twenty-five that reach from childhood to last year tell the story the room came for. So the working answer is: gather everything you can find, then let the editor cut to 20–40. You are collecting raw material, not making the final selection.

Photos that span the decades, and candid ones over posed ones. The most common gathering mistake is submitting thirty pictures from the last five years, because those are the ones already on a phone. A memorial film needs the earlier chapters too: childhood, young adulthood, the wedding or partnership, parenthood, the later years. Within each chapter, a candid frame almost always plays better than a studio portrait — someone mid-laugh, mid-sentence, caught not posing. And include two or three everyday shots: the kitchen, the garden, the armchair by the window, the workbench. Those are the images that make a room go quiet, because that is where the family actually knew them. A blurry photo of him at his own stove can matter more than a sharp one of him at a banquet.

Send them. Modern restoration repairs more than most families expect, and less than the marketing around it suggests. Scratches, creases, tears through a background, water staining, color shift in 1970s prints, faded contrast, and moderate softness are all routinely fixable. What restoration cannot do is invent information that was never captured. If a face is a smear of six pixels, if the head is turned away, if motion blur has erased the eyes and mouth — no tool recovers a likeness from that. Anything that claims otherwise is generating a plausible stranger, and families notice, usually at the worst possible moment. So we assess before we promise. Send the damaged ones with everything else, and we will tell you which are repairable, which are usable as-is at a smaller size, and which are not going to work.

Yes — and this is the part families most often skip. Five seconds of them moving changes what a film can do. A shaky clip from a birthday dinner, a few frames of them walking to the car, a video that was really meant to record the grandchildren but caught their laugh in the background: any of these can open or close a film in a way no still photograph can. Audio matters just as much. One saved voicemail, one video with them talking off camera, one old recording of a toast is enough to consider a Voice Farewell (from US$649), where their recreated voice reads a goodbye letter as the film's closing words. That path needs roughly 60 seconds of usable speech, and we test before anyone pays.

One album, one collector, one deadline. The gathering — not the editing — is what makes families miss the service date. The method that works under a four-day timeline is deliberately narrow: create one shared album (Google Photos, iCloud, Dropbox — whichever most of the family already uses), name one person as the collector, and send every relative the same short request. Ask each for "your five favorites, plus anything with their voice in it." Five is a number people can do in ten minutes; "send whatever you have" is a number nobody can do at all. Give a 48-hour deadline and say plainly that the film goes into edit at that point. And tell everyone not to sort, curate, or judge — send the whole roll, including the blurry ones. Sorting is the editor's job, and the frame a relative nearly deleted is often the one that ends up in the film.