Gathering Photos for a Funeral — A Practical Canadian Guide

Photos are the part of a funeral that families most often run out of time for. Not because it is difficult, but because it is the only task that depends on other people going and looking for something. An aunt has to find the box. A cousin has to work out how to send a picture. That takes days, and a funeral is usually within a week.

So this is a day-one job, ahead of most of the list. Everything below is ordered by when to do it.

Day one — set up one place for everything #

Create a single shared album or folder, and only one. Whatever you already use is the right choice — a shared album on your phone's photo service, or a shared cloud folder. What matters is that there is exactly one destination. Two half-full albums is the failure mode here, and it happens whenever a second family member helpfully starts their own.

Set it so anyone with the link can add to it. If people have to make an account or request access, a meaningful share of them will simply stop.

Send the link by text, not email. This is the single highest-leverage thing in this guide. Email after a death goes unread — there is too much of it, and it arrives alongside everything else. A group text gets opened. Keep it to three lines:

We're putting together photos of Bob for Saturday. If you have any, add them here — no need to sort them, just send what you have: [link]. Anything by Thursday night helps.

Give a deadline that is earlier than the real one. Say Thursday night for a Saturday service. Photos will still trickle in afterwards and that is fine, but the stated deadline is what people act on.

Ask for context, not just images. One line in the group text — "if you know roughly when or where it was taken, put it in the message" — saves a lot of guessing later, and it is often the only chance to capture it while the people who remember are still together.

Day one or two — printed photographs #

Most of the oldest and best pictures are prints in a box, and this is where families lose the most time.

A handful of prints — use a phone #

For anything up to twenty or thirty prints, a phone is genuinely good enough for a slideshow or a memorial board. Use the document or photo scanner built into your phone's camera, notes, or files app, or any scanning app you already have — they handle edge detection and flattening for you.

Three things make the difference:

• Hold the phone square to the print, directly above it, not at an angle.
• Good even light. Near a window is ideal. Avoid direct overhead light, which throws a shadow of the phone onto the photo.
• Fill the frame with the print and crop after, rather than shooting the whole table.

For glossy prints that reflect, tilt very slightly off square and crop the edges back. That kills the glare.

A whole box — use a local scanning service, not a mail-in kit #

This is the one to get right. Mail-in scanning services are the obvious search result and the wrong answer before a funeral. Their normal turnaround runs from several weeks to a couple of months, and that is before shipping in both directions. They are fine for a family archiving project in an ordinary month. They are useless when the service is on Saturday.

What you want instead is a local lab that will do it same-day or next-day. These exist in most Canadian cities — search for photo scanning or photo digitizing in your city, and phone rather than email. Ask three questions: can you have them back by the day of the service, what is the rush charge, and can I collect the originals at the same time.

As an indication of what this costs in Canada, one Toronto lab publishes a tiered price list for bulk print scanning — from $50 plus tax for 50 prints up to $150 plus tax for 300 prints, with a 30% surcharge for next-day and 50% for same-day turnaround.^[1] That works out to somewhere between roughly 50 cents and a dollar per print at standard speed. Prices vary by city and by lab, so treat that as a sense of the order of magnitude rather than a quote.

Ask for JPEG files at 300 dpi or higher — more than enough for a screen, and fine for reprinting at normal sizes. And photograph the box before you hand it over, so you know what went in.

Midweek — choosing and assembling #

Aim for 40 to 80 images for a slideshow that runs during a visitation, and 15 to 30 prints for a memorial table or board. Beyond that, people stop looking.

Spread them across the whole life. The instinct is to use recent photographs because they are the easiest to find. A slideshow that opens with childhood and works forward is far more affecting, and it gives older relatives something to recognise.

Include other people. Photographs of the person alone are less interesting than photographs of them with the people in the room. Group shots also give guests something to talk about afterwards, which is most of what a visitation is for.

Do not over-edit. Slight crops and a straighten are worth doing. Filters are not. A grainy 1970s print looks like 1974, and that is the point of it.

Before the day — the technical part #

This is where slideshows fail, and the failures are all avoidable.

Export as MP4, H.264, 1080p. That combination plays on essentially any laptop, projector, or TV a venue will have. If the funeral home asks for a specific aspect ratio, 16:9 is the usual answer.

Bring a USB stick as well as a link. Venue wifi is frequently poor, and a cloud link that will not load five minutes before a service is a bad moment. Put the finished MP4 on a plain USB stick, and bring a second one.

Test it at the venue the day before. Not on your laptop at home — at the venue, on their equipment, with your USB stick. Check that it plays, that the sound comes through their system at a sensible volume, and that the picture is not cut off at the edges. Funeral homes expect this request and will usually make time for it.

Check the running time against the slot. A slideshow meant to loop during a visitation should be short enough to loop, not one long piece that ends awkwardly.

Ask the funeral home first #

Before paying anyone for any of this: ask the funeral home what they already include. Many Canadian funeral homes will assemble a photo tribute from images the family supplies, at no additional charge, as part of the arrangements. Some will scan a modest number of prints for you. Some have a screen and will run whatever you bring.

It is a two-minute question and it regularly saves a few hundred dollars. It also tells you what format they actually want, which is worth knowing before you export anything.

Afterwards #

Whatever you gathered is now the most complete collection of that person's photographs in the family, and it exists because of a week that nobody wants to repeat. Keep it.

Give the shared album a permanent home, make sure more than one person can access it, and consider putting a copy on a drive that is not in the same house as the original. Families very often find that the funeral collection becomes the family archive — and it is worth ten minutes now to make sure it does not quietly disappear when someone changes phones.

What we focus on at It's Simple Will #

The Order of Service Planner puts gathering photos at the top of the family checklist for exactly the reason above — it is the task that needs the most lead time and gets started last. It also records where the memorial photo is kept and who is running the slideshow, so it is not one person holding all of it in their head.

Related guides #

• How to write an obituary in Canada
• Writing a eulogy
• Funeral planning checklist for Canada
• Online memorial pages
• Funeral planning in Canada — the complete guide