What to do with your photos after the wedding

So the cake has long since been eaten, the phone photos of the day have stopped trickling through – hey you might even have been a guest at a wedding since yours, and you’re soon going to get your wedding photos back. My recommendation to all my couples is to wait to look at them until you’re together – fill your glasses (am going to recommend some champagne, but a mug of hot chocolate will do too) and start by watching the slideshow – this will help you relive the story and narrative of your wedding day and I think it’s a really good idea to feel this sense of reliving the day before you dive into looking at each individual image.

It’s natural not to love them all

It can be a bit daunting looking at lots of photos of yourselves – even the most confident and aware of us would struggle with that. I have a separate post about learning to love yourself in your wedding photos, that I think is worth a read, but I’ll reiterate my experience – when I got my wedding photos back I love, love, loved the ones of my friends and family – the ones that told a story – but I fixated on the things I didn’t love about the ones of me and I think it really spoilt my enjoyment of that time. Now, a little (ahem) older, wider and a parent, I can look back on them and see the reality of it all, and just how great I looked – time is a great healer and all that. My advice is to use the favourites tool in your gallery to highlight your favourites, and focus on those for a while. I can promise you that your opinion of yourself in those photos will grow and shift and evolve, just as your marriage does too.

Now we’ve put that out there, it’s time to move on to the nitty gritty of what to actually do with all these digital files you are soon to be in possession of.

What you’ll get

All my wedding images are delivered as high resolution jpgs – that means they’re ready to print, fully edited and colour graded and as you will see on my site/social media/in any galleries I will have sent you to look through prior to deciding to work with me.

They’ll be 20″ along the long edge and 300 dpi (which is the usual dpi for printing), though you can also download a ‘web resolution’ file from your gallery. This, for me, is a good trade off between the image file being big enough for lots of applications, and not making any computer or other device too slow when you decide to start accessing all 700 or so of them. If you want to print a favourite image reeeeaaaaalllly big, just let me know and I can send you an appropriately big file. All that said, you may find that the file is plenty big enough, the bigger the print, the further away you’d view it and the lower the dpi that’s required, and no one over the years has needed one bigger than the ones included. Just let me know if you need any bespoke advice

Back ’em up, back ’em up

Your images will be delivered to you in your own personal online gallery, which will be live for a year from your image delivery date. In a few clicks you can download all high resolution images as a zip file onto a computer harddrive. You can also download singular high resolution or web-res images onto your photo (or a selection if images, but you need to do them one at a time) as most mobiles can’t handle zipped files.

The average full gallery size is going to be somewhere around 8-10GB, so if you don’t have space on a laptop or desktop computer for that, you can change your browser settings to download straight onto a harddrive or USB key.

If you want to download directly to another drive – this is how you can change your default download location – this is really useful if you don’t have loads of spare space.

In each case, I recommend saving your files to one physical location – so that might be your own computer harddrive, an external hardrive or whatever AND one cloud based location.

For Hard-drives – I like the LaCie Rugged range. Grab a Sharpie, or you can use a fancy label maker if you have one and write on it ‘wedding photos’.

Check when buying them that they have the correct cables for your setup – some come only with USB-C cables, so check that works for your individual setup.

Alternatively, a little pocket drive like this Sandisk 16GB USB can be a cheaper alternative, but they are very tiny and you’d want to make sure you keep it in a safe place and, again, labelled.

Remember technology changes, it breaks down, make sure you check your harddrives regularly and consider transferring the images to a new one should formats change, you buy a new laptop with different ports etc. Please take heed of my cautionary tale – our wedding photos were given to us on a disc (when the writable CD reigned supreme) and I sort of just assumed it would always be about, so I’d make my own album etc when I had the time/money. In the meantime, years went by, life happened and then I realised I had a laptop with no disc drive, and when I did try and access the images, half the files were corrupt. This is no-one’s fault (except maybe mine), so care for your images and print them out sooner rather than later. I’m a pro and I should have known better.

Cloud storage

This is where cloud storage comes into its own. I still believe you should have your own physical storage (as a back up, data giants blah blah and also you never know if one of those companies might one day disppear and take everything with them) but its super handy to have an on-demand storage system, where in a few clicks you can access your files from anywhere. This also helps save them from things like break-ins, fire or flood; or getting chewed by dogs or snapped by toddlers etc.

I’m sure those of you who are of an IT persuasion will have your own ideas and opinions about cloud storage and what products work well, so these ideas are for us mere mortals. There’s a high chance you might already have some of these services anyway, so you can create a long term storage solution for your photos without paying any extra.

Google Drive

iCloud (You might be paying for this anyway if you are an iPhone user

Amazon (Prime members getting unlimited storage, non Prime customers get up to 5GB of photos)

Dropbox (again, you might already have this if you share files between devices)

Lots of places online pointed to iDrive being a good paid option, if you don’t already use the others.

Print your Photos

This is the most crucial one – as I have often quoted when sending out galleries – no one ever found a jpg in an attic, whilst some of the memories I have as a child of leafing through our family photo album; or of rediscovered lost photos in amongst piles of old papers – are cherished.

Those photos of grandparents, often so lovingly displayed on a wedding day, are so well preserved not because they were stored on a long-since corrupted harddrive, but because they were printed and carefully stored and treated with care.

Whether it’s getting an album professionally designed and printed, getting some framed prints up on the wall or simply getting your favourites printed as 4×6 images and putting them in a keepsake box, I think it’s really important to have your images printed – not just to compliment digital storage but also simply to enjoy.

I offer all kinds of printed loveliness via your Pic-Time store – these come from hand selected professional photo labs, use archival inks onto specialist paper and I have verified that the colours should be true to the edit you receive, and I think everything on offer is pretty great, but this is just a courtesy and you can have your images printed anywhere you like.

Some cheaper online photo printing labs aren’t great at replicating the colours you might see in your edited photos, so here’s a few that I recommend

DS Colour Labs – for all your standard photo prints. I recommend adding borders to make the prints look really lovely.

The Print Space – for very high quality large format printing and lots of paper options for Giclee prints

For albums – Bob Books

What’s the difference between a Giclee Print and a standard print?

In a very simple nutshell – standard photographic prints are usually on photographic paper – which usually has a bit of a sheen – the prints I offer are on Fuji Lustre paper which isn’t fully shiny. Giclee, or Fine Art prints, are usually specialist prints on specially selected fine art paper – there are many different kinds – some like textured watercolour paper, others like photographic paper again, others just very smooth and bright. They are often available in larger size formats too as they are digitally printed.

There are also C-Type prints – prints that have been digitally exposed onto traditional photographic paper – like in a darkroom but using digital technology.

And that’s it – remember I’ll host your photos for a year after delivering them to you. I strongly believe that after you’ve invested so much in the creation of your photos, then it’s worth investing a tiny bit more in the long term storage and presentation of your images. Despite all the advances in technology, the printed image – either framed to enjoy, or ready for you to look through, has endured and I still strongly believe in it. If you need anything else from me, then I’m here for all your printing and storage based questions.