How We Create a Video Slideshow to Celebrate the Bride & Groom

If a family wedding is in your future, you might have “create a photo slideshow for the rehearsal dinner” on your to-do list. 

Video slideshows are a fun way to celebrate the joining of two lives by reminiscing with photos of the bride and groom at different stages of their lives and relationship. Photos of the bride and groom with family and friends also honors the important people in their lives.

The months of wedding preparation are full of busy tasks. If you’re tight on time, and don’t want to learn the technical side of creating a slideshow for the happy couple, our team is available to create it for you. Here’s how to get your photos ready for us:

1. Collect Photos From the Couple and Family Members 

The overall theme of the slideshow should reflect the couple’s style and story. For example, if they met as children, or were high school sweethearts, the slideshow can illustrate their relationship over time. A couple with a shorter courtship as adults, may not include as many photos of the two of them together and may feature more individual family photos. But that’s OK!

When gathering the collection, include photos that:

• Show the bride and groom as babies through their elementary and high school years.
• Celebrate the couple with their family members.
• Share memories of each one with their friends.
• Show the couple together with their mutual friends.
• Display individual and shared interests over the years like sports and hobbies.
• Highlight their engagement.

How many photos should you include?
We suggest that as you gather photos, don’t initially limit yourself to the number. When we talk through the details of your slideshow, we will get a better idea of the slideshow length and the number of photos we need. Then we can work with you to narrow down your selection.

As a general guideline, we think each photo’s duration should be just under three seconds. So a slideshow with 120 photos would be about six minutes long.

2. List Your Themes and Get Your Photos Ready to Pass Along to Us

As you look at your collection of photos, you will see a few themes emerge. Make a list of the most obvious subjects like babies, kids, teens, college years, shared interests, families, friends and/or wedding party, and photos of the couple.

We will use this list to create individual albums or folders, adding appropriate pictures to each one. Then we will put them in an order that tells the couple’s story. 

Your collection of slideshow photos may be a mix of prints and digital files. 

We collect your prints, scan them, and add any image corrections that might be needed. If you scan any printed photos yourself, make sure to scan them at 600 dpi.

There are several ways for us to collect your digital images. But first, we suggest that you place them in one central location, or file.

You could simply drag and drop them into a folder on your computer’s desktop, then copy that folder to an external hard drive or thumb drive.

If you are a Mac user, and all of the photos are in your Apple Photos library, we suggest you create an Album and title it “Wedding Slideshow” then drag all of the photos into that album.

One tip if you use this method: Take a few minutes and indicate your favorites, the photos you KNOW you want included, by highlighting the “♡” icon.

If you want to go a step further, you can create a Folder in My Albums titled “Wedding Slideshow.” Then add individual Albums within that folder titled with each of your subjects or themes.

This post has more information on creating albums in Apple Photos.

Again, you can export your “Wedding Slideshow” album to an external hard drive for us. But with your permission, we can also access your Apple Photos library remotely. We talk more about how we work remotely with our clients in this post.

3. Decide on Some Slideshow Details for Us to Include

When we start to work on your project, we will ask you for some additional details to round out your slideshow.

Titles, Subtitles and Captions
Will you want any text added to your slideshow? We can add title slides to the beginning, and credits to the end of the show. We can also add captions or subtitles at any point during the slideshow. 

In order to add text, we will need a list of names, dates, and any specific titles, or subtitles you’d like to see in the slideshow.

Choosing Music
We understand that music adds an emotional background to a slideshow. You may have already decided on one or two specific songs. 

Due to copyright laws, any music in slideshows we produce for our clients must be royalty free, or used with permission.

If you have popular songs in mind, we can help you find a licensed version, or a cover version of the song. Keep in mind that acquiring permission to use copyrighted music can be quite expensive. 

If another version is not available, we can help you find similar royalty-free songs that will still express the theme and mood of your slideshow.

Your Finished Project Ready to Show at Wedding Events

Our team gets to work creating a memorable and beautiful tribute for the wedding celebration.

We return your finished video in a file format compatible with your computer (typically an .mp4 or .mov file), and ready to play. You may only feature the slideshow at the shower or rehearsal dinner, but people love to stop and watch if it’s playing in the background at the wedding reception, too.

You can view the rehearsal dinner slideshow we created for our daughter Molly and son-in-law Michael’s wedding here.

Handing over this project to us can take one of the most stressful wedding-related tasks off your plate…and leave you free to enjoy the celebrations!

Contact us to book your free consultation appointment – we can’t wait to talk to you about creating this video slideshow to highlight the bride and groom!