While there’s no “correct,” objective answer to the question of an appropriate length for a slideshow to be presented at a wedding, there are a number of factors to consider that can help determine what works best for your particular presentation.
For example, is the slideshow going to be run as an endless loop running on a wall continuously, fading slowly from one slide to the next, for people to watch in passing or, if they choose, to watch the whole thing? Is it intended to show the bride and the groom at various stages of growing up, finishing off with a number of photos of the couple together (this seems to be the most common progression)?
Or is it going to be shown as an “event” unto itself, with dimming of lights and an announcement, as a true slideshow? I think this would be less appealing among the guests, who, once they have switched from “ceremony mode” into “celebration mode” might be a bit impatient at being rounded up for the viewing–much in the way that people have little patience for watching other people’s home movies.
At one wedding, I noticed that the couple used a single slide of a field of flowers in their wedding colors, with their names and wedding date superimposed on it, shown on a huge screen, to both cover an unsightly background for the ceremony, and to add more of their colors to an otherwise drab surrounding.
Check with your fiancé’s family for pictures of him growing up. This can be a touchy subject since some families will then immediately want “their” pictures to be whole-family portraits. It might be okay for one or two photos to have another person in the picture, but in general you want pictures that feature him alone. For whatever reason, my experience has been that there will be more photos to choose from on the bride’s side. If you think about how many pictures of someone else’s childhood you could stand through without becoming impatient, I would say to limit it to 9 or 10 pictures of each of you at approximately comparable ages, to be shown alternately–one of you, one of him–(you want to have exactly the same number of each, even if you have to make some hard choices, in order to avoid hurt feelings by having the presentation loaded more heavily with photos of one of you than the other)–and then several pictures of the two of you together (not more than 5 or 6)–try to make them out of the ordinary, such as if the two of you dressed up for a Hallowe’en party one year.
If each slide shows and then fades to a new photo every 5 seconds, 9-10 pictures of each of you plus 6 ‘couple’ shots would give you about 2 ½ minutes. You may want to increase the time that each slide shows to 10 seconds. All in all, just a few minutes for people to view the whole slideshow in its entirety. Long enough to get a good look at each photo, but not so long that a guest couldn’t wait to see that particular photo come up again.
03.19.08
