Year-end client recap video: twelve photos, one Timeline render

A small agency, contractor or studio can thank clients before Christmas Day (Friday, December 25, 2026, per OPM, read 2026-10-03) with a 36-second recap made from twelve real project photos. Timeline holds each still for three seconds, a short fade joins them, and caption cues carry a one-line caption per photo. There is no generation involved, which is the point: every frame is a real result you delivered. The limits come from the Timeline docs: stills are static holds, fade and wipe transitions run at most a second, and sources must live on media.sume.com.

OPM supplies the holiday date and nothing else. Do not add statistics about the year unless you can back them from your own records.

Timeline rules that matter for slideshows

Read these before you plan the length, so the plan call does not surprise you.

Pick the twelve

Choose by client, not by beauty. A client who sees their own project feels thanked; one who sees only a stranger's does not.

• Ask clients first if their project or premises will be shown.
• Pair every photo with a caption of at most six words.
• Skip any photo that shows an address, license plate or child.
• End on your own contact line.

Burn the captions

After the Timeline render, a single captions call can burn one cue per photo. Each cue is text with a start and end in seconds.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: year-end-recap" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/example/recap.mp4",
    "style": "slam",
    "cues": [
      {"text": "Kitchen remodel, March", "start": 0.2, "end": 2.8},
      {"text": "Garden deck, June", "start": 3.2, "end": 5.8}
    ]
  }'

Limits

A slideshow is not a case study. It says nothing about outcomes, so do not caption results you cannot prove. Sume does not email clients; send the file or link yourself. The URL in the code sample is a placeholder for your own imported render.