How To Honor Your Parents with an Awesome Anniversary Slideshow

A vintage anniversary slideshow can be a fun and a great way to honor your folks on their anniversary. I’ll give you some tips on how to pull it all together and tell their story in an elegant and classy way by creating an anniversary slideshow that highlights the parts you love most about their life. But first I want to share a little bit of my story and how I was able to do something special for them.

I remember my dad spending a few nights at Grandma’s after him and my mom got into an argument. I remember it being a very tough time for me especially that they kept communication between me and my siblings to a minimum.

Their wedding anniversary happens to be on Valentine’s Day, which is ironic for a couple that I thought didn’t seem to like each other very much. But each year I witnessed my Father offer mom Mom a bouquet of roses, her chocolates, and a $100 massage gift card. I knew there must be some underlying cause of this affection.

This started as a sad story but I quickly learnt that they both loved each other even though they had some tough days. I came to recognize the significance of their union. My heart melted to witness their respect to their commitment of marriage. No matter the consequence, they served each other and nurtured a respectful family. For these two wonderful people, I wanted to gift them something special on their 20th anniversary.

I decided to invite their friends over for dinner and tell their story with pictures..

At first I wasn’t sure where to start when I sat down to create the slideshow. I learned that you’ll want to come with lots of anniversary video ideas. YouTube is a great place to start brainstorming ideas on what you might want the video to look like.  You can start with their wedding invitation or wedding picture if you can find it. You can then add more photos of their best friends from back in the day. Along with photos of your childhood. After that you’ll want to organize it all by date so you can have a nice flow of story highlights from the day they got married until today. After that you’ll want to use a good anniversary slideshow maker that can put it all elegantly together.  I’ll tell you more about that below.

Selecting Photos of their Wedding

I wanted to the slideshow to be feel like a rich experience of love. Like an expensive bottle of wine without the cheesy factor.  There are ways to make the slideshow have a vintage theme without making it look old and cheesy. If you have photos of them back in their early 20s or of them taking a vacation together or maybe a picture of them on their wedding day then put that together. It’s a great way to share the story of how it all began.

For my folks, my primary objective was to create a superb playlist. I started by playing the song they met on, accompanied by a video of dancers from that era. If you want your parents to flashback to those times. It turned out to be a good place to start.

Keep up the Humor

There’s nothing more boring than a gloomy and slideshow. For my slideshow, I created a game that dismissed each person that had been seen in the photos until there were only 2 people left in the room. It was light enough to keep everyone entertained.

I made sure to include pictures of both of them and their best friends having a blast.  Everyone felt young and free and was laughing remembering some of these days.

I didn’t want to spend hours putting everything together.  I wanted to focus on the creative part and not the technical part of the slideshow. I knew I was going to spend hours online researching anniversary slideshow ideas so I decided to use SmartSHOW 3D. Real quick, these are the steps I took that made it super simple:

• Create a folder that has all the photographs you want to use.
• Start SmartSHOW 3D and create a new slideshow. Choose the ‘Slideshow in 5 minutes’ option if you are short on time.
• Select the “Vintage Wedding Album” template. It already comes pre-configured with all the settings you will need. This will save you tons of time. Trust me!

• Add your pictures. You can add, edit or remove effects to make the slideshow more appealing or you can just leave the default settings.
• There are some recommended background music you can choose or you can download or use your own soundtrack. Some piano-based music to accompany the slideshow can have a nice background effect.
• Save the slideshow once you are finished and there you have it, a vintage wedding slideshow! That’s it!

More to Come!

I really wanted to remind them that the best is yet to come.  So my tip to you is not to let your story be one that leaves them thinking the best years are behind them. I wanted it to end with them knowing that their decision to stay together is respectable and it’s an awesome thing to witness their timeless devotion.

By the end of the slideshow, I had the best picture I could find of them hugging. It was the perfect ending. For you, just keep the creativity alive when creating your parents’ slideshow. Don’t limit yourself. The sky is the limit!