Turning your photographer’s files into a wedding album

The photographs come back on a stick or a download link, everybody looks through them twice, and then they sit there. Two years later the couple comes in because somebody asked to see the wedding album and there is not one.

Cut it down hard

Four hundred photographs is not an album, it is an archive. A good wedding album is somewhere between sixty and a hundred images. That feels brutal when you start and obvious when you finish.

Go through once and mark anything you would show somebody. Do not agonise. Then go through your marked set and cut it by a third. What survives two passes is almost always the right edit.

Keep the shape of the day

Resist sorting by how good each photograph is. An album that runs morning to night tells the story; an album of greatest hits does not. Weak photographs earn their place if they carry the sequence, and a brilliant one can sit oddly if it jumps the order.

Check what you were given

Ask the photographer for full resolution files rather than the web versions. Most supply both and most couples never notice. The web set is fine on a screen and visibly soft across a double page spread.

If you only have a gallery link, download the originals before the link expires. They do expire, and we cannot print from something that has gone.

The rest of the day

Couples often bring the order of service, an invitation and a table plan along with the photographs. Scanned and laid in, they do more for an album than another ten photographs would.

A guest book can be bound to match, so the pair sit together on a shelf rather than looking unrelated.

No hurry

There is no deadline on this one, which is exactly why it never gets done. Bring the stick in and we will go through it with you. An hour at the counter usually settles what two years of meaning to has not.