A funeral slideshow without PowerPoint, from making it to playing it

Everything happens in a web browser such as Chrome, Safari, Edge or Firefox, on a phone, a tablet or a laptop. Nothing is installed and no Office licence is involved. That makes a Chromebook or an iPad, where PowerPoint is often missing or cut down, just as good a place to work as a Windows laptop.

Photos go in as they are: HEIC from an iPhone, JPEG, PNG, and scans or PDFs too, with no converting first. You lay the memorial slideshow out in parts that follow the order of service, for example a walk-in loop, a speaker, a funeral photo slideshow set to music, and a closing loop. For a part with music you add your own MP3 and the photos spread themselves across the length of the song. A photo stays on screen for 8 seconds at most; plan on at least 6 seconds per photo.

The preview runs in that same browser, with the music and the pauses in place, as many times as you like. You see the finished result without opening a presentation program at all. Only once you are happy do you decide which format to download.

You invite relatives and friends by email as helpers. They get in with their email address and a code, and add photos, videos and music to one shared collection from their own phone or computer. Nobody needs a particular program for that. You then decide what goes into which part of the celebration of life slideshow.

In the Farewell Player everything behaves as you set it up. A part marked to wait only begins when the operator presses the space bar. During a speaker the photo stays put until someone moves on. A walk-in loop repeats until the service starts. The music is inside the file and starts with the right part. Control is by keyboard: space bar to start and pause, left and right arrows for the previous and next slide, up and down arrows for the previous and next part.

A video cannot wait. The file runs from start to finish with the music fixed to it. The pause therefore sits between files: because each part is its own video, the operator starts the next one when the moment comes. With numbered photos the operator clicks through every picture by hand and plays the music separately, so the pace is entirely in the venue's hands.

A presentation built at home in one program and opened at the venue in a different version can look different: the music fails to start, or the timing drifts. The Player and a video avoid that. The file holds everything and plays the way you saw it in the preview.

It is easier for the operator too. Five keys cover the Player, and a wireless presenter remote behaves like the arrow keys. A video needs nothing more than the play button.

And nothing is locked in. If the venue later asks for a different file after all, you download the slideshow again in another format without starting over.