For Families Preparing a Memorial
Scan the prints with your phone, upload the lot, and Timeline Scan works out when each photo was taken, then hands back one folder, oldest to newest, ready for any slideshow app or your funeral home.
The week nobody plans for
The slideshow itself is the easy part: PowerPoint, Canva, or the funeral home's tribute software can turn a folder of photos into a slideshow in an evening. The hard part is what comes first: albums and shoeboxes from every decade, spread across houses and siblings, with almost nothing written on the backs.
Every guide gives the same advice: put the photos in chronological order. None of them say how you're supposed to do that with hundreds of undated prints in a weekend. That's the part Timeline Scan does for you.
What you get back
Your photos come back renamed so that name order is date order. Drop the folder into any slideshow maker, or hand it straight to the funeral home, and the life story is already in sequence.
Every photo in one folder, renamed so the first file is the earliest photo and the last is the most recent.
Slideshow apps and digital frames play files in name order, so the order is already done.
Prefer to hand-pick from each era? Year folders make it easy to choose a few photos from every stage of a life (childhood, wedding, family years, later years) so no decade gets left out.
You choose the layout at download time and can download again in another layout at no extra cost. Every option is shown on the file download page. The corrected dates are also written inside each file, so the photos sort correctly in Google Photos and Apple Photos afterward.
Keeping the collection organized after the service? See photos in folders by year.
From shoebox to slideshow-ready
Photos of photos work: lay prints on a table and photograph them with your phone, or use any scanner. On a Mac, our free FrontBack Scanner captures whole stacks fast, including the handwriting on the backs.
Timeline Scan reads handwriting on the backs, dates printed by the photo lab, and clues in the picture, such as clothing, cars, and rooms, plus the photos nearby from the same album. You can review the timeline and adjust anything.
Save one folder, oldest to newest, back to your computer. Drop it into PowerPoint, Canva, or iMovie, or put it on a USB stick and hand it to the funeral home. It's ready either way.
What the memorial guides agree on
Funeral-industry and slideshow-maker guides converge on the same simple recipe. If you're deciding tonight, use this:
| Decision | What works | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Number of photos | 60–80 | Enough to tell a whole life without losing the room; fewer is fine, just hold each photo longer |
| Time per photo | 4–5 seconds | Long enough to recognize faces, short enough to keep the story moving |
| Total length | 5–8 minutes | About one or two songs; longer versions can loop at the viewing or reception |
| Music | 1–2 songs they loved | Gentle and personal beats generic; match the tone of the service |
| Order | Chronological, oldest to newest | Guests instinctively follow a life story from beginning to end. This is the part Timeline Scan automates |
| Ending | One recent portrait, held longer | A quiet, dignified place for the room to rest |
These numbers reflect the consistent guidance of memorial slideshow guides from Animoto and Funeral.com, among others.
One more thing the guides agree on: choose photos from every era, not just the early years. Guests who knew the person recently should see the years they shared. That's much easier once the photos sit in front of you already in order: the gaps show themselves. And the free trial, with no credit card, covers most of a typical service slideshow.
Letting someone else build it
Many funeral homes will assemble the tribute video for you, or play your slideshow on their screens. What they ask for is the same everywhere: your photos, digitized, chosen, and in play order, usually a day or two before the service.
That's exactly what the oldest-to-newest folder is: files renamed so alphabetical order is date order. Copy it to a USB stick or a shared drive, and their software plays the life story in sequence, with no re-sorting on their end and no last-minute phone calls about which photo comes first.
Made for a hard week
A trial-size batch is dated in minutes; larger collections typically finish in hours, not days. Scan this afternoon, review this evening, hand over the folder tomorrow.
Same pixels, same quality. The corrected date is written inside each file in the standard spot, so the photos also land in the right year in Google Photos or Apple Photos afterward.
The folder lives on your own computer as plain files any device can open. Copy it for every sibling. No subscription is needed to keep what you download.
Common questions
Most funeral-industry guides land on 60 to 80 photos: at 4 to 5 seconds per photo that plays for 5 to 8 minutes, about one or two songs. Fewer photos is fine. Simply hold each one on screen a little longer. If the slideshow will loop quietly during a viewing or reception, more photos work well.
Chronological, oldest to newest, is what nearly every guide recommends and what guests instinctively follow: a life told from childhood to the most recent years. Grouping by theme (family, work, travel) also works, but chronological order is the default for a reason. Timeline Scan puts scanned photos in chronological order automatically, even when no one wrote dates on them.
Timeline Scan estimates when each photo was taken by reading handwriting on the backs of prints, dates printed by the photo lab or camera, and clues in the picture itself, such as clothing, cars, and rooms, plus the photos that sat nearby in the same album or envelope. You can review the timeline and adjust any photo before downloading. Curious about the details? See how we fix scanned photo dates.
Often, yes. Many funeral homes will assemble a tribute video or play your slideshow on their equipment. What they need from you is the photos, digitized, chosen, and in play order, usually a day or two before the service. Timeline Scan's oldest-to-newest folder is built for exactly that hand-off: the files are renamed so alphabetical order is date order.
Fast enough. Photographing a shoebox of prints with a phone takes an afternoon, and flatbed or app scans work too. Once uploaded, a trial-size batch is dated in minutes and larger collections typically finish in hours, not days, so most families go from shoebox to ordered folder in a single day. If you're near Lehi, Utah, we can scan the prints for you as well.
You can try it free with no credit card, enough photos for a small slideshow, and see your own photos dated and put in order before paying anything. After that, pricing is per photo; see the pricing page for current rates.
Start with free photos, no credit card required. See your photos in order before you decide anything.
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