If you plan to include poems, stories or another type of narration along with your photo montage, use instrumental music as your background so no lyrics interfere with the words being narrated. Recordings of chamber music are well-suited to photo montage projects, since they are easy to enjoy and unobtrusive. Romantic European chamber music, such as the small-ensemble works of Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert and Brahms, consists of musical numbers with a wide range of timbres, moods and lengths of time, making it easy to customize your choice to your montage.
Songs written just for kids (or popular among young singers) are often ideal background music for family photo montages because they are often written about family outings and common kid experiences. For example, play a recording of "We're Goin' to the Zoo" by Tom Paxton (famously recorded by Raffi) to accompany photos of a trip to the zoo, or "Octopus's Garden" by Ringo Starr for pictures from a trip to an aquarium or beach.
If you have computer software designed to display a montage of photos from a computer file in random order, consider combining this with an audio play list that does the same thing. Most major media player software allows users to create a custom list of song files and play them in shuffle or random order. When organizing your play list and photo list, compare each photo to each song and try to make collections that will work well no matter what photo is combined with what piece of music. This way, you can have some creative control yet still be surprised by each picture-and-song combination.
Piece together some of your favorite romantic songs with photos of you and your significant other to enjoy some of your best event memories along with some of your best song memories. Don't forget to include your special song as a couple.
For a different approach, use music as the inspiration for a photo montage rather than matching music to an existing photo arrangement. Plan your montage by gathering your photos in one place, then turning on a few of your favorite pieces of music, set on repeat. As you listen to the music over and over, look through the photos and try to find some that seem to fit the music. Set them aside, and then listen again to brainstorm the order of your photos and their display times.