How to choose the photos for a memorial

The photos are the most visited part of any memorial. Choosing them well turns a gallery into a biography.

The main photo

This is the one at the top of the page, and the one that appears when the link is shared. Look for one where the person is recognisably themselves, just as you remember them: with their usual expression, ideally smiling, ideally close up. It doesn't have to be the most recent; it has to be the most them.

Tell a life, not a year

A good gallery travels through the eras: the photo from their youth that hardly anyone has seen, the wedding, the children when they were small, their work, the village fete, the last Christmas. Five decades in fifteen photos say more than forty photos from the same summer.

Criteria that help

• A variety of company: alone, with their partner, with friends, with grandchildren.
• Their things: their garden, their workshop, their kitchen, their dog. The settings are part of the portrait too.
• Good enough, not perfect. A blurry but unrepeatable photo (that laugh, that hug) is worth more than a sharp, dull one.
• Captions. A year and a place turn an image into a story: “Blackpool, 1987, with her sister Ann.”

Common mistakes

• Uploading hundreds of unfiltered photos: quantity dilutes.
• Forgetting to ask the rest of the family: everyone keeps treasures the others know nothing about.
• Writing off printed photos: a picture from an old album, photographed with a phone on a well-lit table, comes out perfectly presentable.

A living gallery

The memorial doesn't close on the day of the funeral. Visitors can contribute photos the family never knew existed — workmates, friends from their youth — and that is often the most moving part: discovering that their life was even bigger than you knew.