How long should a wedding slideshow be?
Choose a short wedding slideshow length, pace the photographs and test the screen. A prepared slideshow and a live guest photo wall serve different purposes.
October 15, 20265 min read
Five minutes, and about seventy photographs at four seconds each. If it is playing on a loop during drinks rather than being watched, length stops mattering and you want ninety to a hundred and twenty so it does not repeat while people are standing there.
Every page answering this gives a different number, between three minutes and fifteen, which is why the question keeps getting asked. The spread is not disagreement. It is that a slideshow people sit and watch and a slideshow playing on a wall behind a bar are two different objects with the same name.
The arithmetic
| Length | Photos at 4s | Photos at 5s | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 minutes | 45 | 36 | over before people settle |
| 5 minutes | 75 | 60 | the safe answer for a seated room |
| 8 minutes | 120 | 96 | long. Works only with the lights down |
| 12 minutes | 180 | 144 | people start talking at minute seven |
Four seconds a photograph is the figure to build on. Three feels rushed on anything with more than two faces in it, and six is long enough that a room notices the wait. If a particular photograph deserves longer, give that one six seconds rather than slowing the whole thing down.
Work from the length to the count, not the other way round. Couples almost always start from the pile of photographs they want to include, arrive at eleven minutes, and then cannot cut it because every photograph is somebody's mother. Decide five minutes first and the cutting is a rule rather than an argument.
How long should a wedding slideshow be in each slot
There are three places one of these ends up and they want different lengths. During drinks or an aperitif, on a screen nobody is seated in front of, it loops: aim for eight to ten minutes of material so a guest who watches twice does not see the same run. Nobody watches it end to end and that is fine.
Sat down, with the lights lowered and everybody facing the screen, five minutes is the ceiling. This is the version people mean when they ask. It is also the one that goes wrong, because a captive room is polite for about six minutes and then starts checking phones, and you can watch it happen from the top table.
Late in the evening, after the dancing has started, do not. A screen coming on at half past eleven empties a dance floor that took an hour to fill, and nothing gets it back. If there is a late slot you want to use, three minutes and a hard stop.
Where the photographs come from
This is the actual work and it is the part that runs late. Childhood photographs are prints in somebody's house and they need scanning, which is an evening with a flatbed or a phone and a steady hand rather than a five-minute job. Getting your parents' photographs off the shelf covers how to do it without damaging anything, and it is worth starting a month out.
A prepared slideshow can use childhood photos, pictures of you together and family scans collected before the wedding. Photos from the event itself are a different option: they can appear as guests share them, subject to the gallery’s approval settings. Choose which kind of display you want before planning the running time.
For photos arriving during the celebration, open Melora’s live photo wall from the paid event page on the computer connected to your screen. Test the connection and display before guests arrive. If approval is enabled, arrange for someone to review contributions before they appear. The wall shows the public gallery photos, not private voice or video messages. The host handbook covers the event controls.
The photographs that work in a slideshow are the ones with a reaction in them, and those come from the guests rather than from the formal set. If you collected them, that is where to look. If you are still planning, what to do with wedding photos after the wedding has the rest of what that set is good for.
The mistake that ruins more of these than length does
Portrait photographs on a landscape screen. Every phone photograph from the last fifteen years is taller than it is wide, and a projector is wider than it is tall, so each one appears as a narrow strip in the middle with two black bands either side. Do that for forty photographs and the slideshow reads as an accident.
Fix it by choosing landscape photographs where you can, and by putting two or three portrait ones side by side in a single frame where you cannot. Almost every slideshow tool can do this and almost nobody bothers. It is the single change that makes one of these look considered.
The other one is music. Pick one song, or two, and cut the slideshow to the song rather than fading the music out halfway through a chorus. A four-minute song is about seventy photographs at a little over three seconds each, which is why five minutes and seventy is the answer that keeps coming back: it is roughly one song, and one song is roughly a room's attention.
Whatever you build, keep the source files rather than only the finished video. A slideshow is one arrangement of photographs and you will want a different one in five years, and the export is the lowest resolution copy of everything in it. Backing up wedding photos properly takes about twenty minutes and this is a good week to do it.