You did it! You got married! And now you’re looking through your photos from the day and reflecting on what an amazing experience it all was.
Take your time. Soak in the memories.
So…..now what?
Here are a handful of tips on how I recommend you take care of, share, and protect your wedding photos today and in to the future.
- Back Them Up!
Ok, I know, I know. This isn’t very exciting. But here’s the deal. These are among some of the most important photos you’ll ever have taken, and, let’s be honest, some of the most expensive ones too. So let’s take a few simple steps to ensure that you’ll have them safe and sound to enjoy for a long time to come.
Get those photos backed up into several locations. Immediately! As a rule of thumb, one spot is bare minimum, two is good, three is great. By all means, do more than three if you want, but three should be the goal. And use a variety of locations.
I recommend using:
- one cloud service, something really trusted like Google or Dropbox,
- one device, such as a laptop,
- and at least one storage device, such as an external hard drive or usb drive.
Finally, keep in mind that electronics do fail and websites change and go out of business, so I recommend setting a reminder in your calendar for once a year to just check on each spot and ensure that all is A-OK.
- Share them!
Alright, with that out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff.
Whether you had a large wedding with tons of guests or an intimate elopement, remember that your marriage is a big deal to a lot of people. So let them know share in the celebration by showing them photos from the day. Often times I’ll take a ton of really fun photos of your guests and family members, dressed up and excited to support you. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve grabbed photos of friend groups that haven’t been together in years, or couples that just started dating, or married couples that probably haven’t taken any nice photos of them that aren’t selfies for quite awhile.
And I rarely have any contact info for them.
So send the gallery to them. Or share and tag some of those photos on social media. They will absolutely appreciate it.
- Print them!
Please, please, please. Photos want to be printed and held and touched and appreciated in person, rather than a screen. So pick a couple favorites and use it as an excuse to get some new wall art. Print them big with nice frames.
Or get 4x6s made from the entire gallery that you can sit and flick through together over pizza and some drinks.
Or, better yet, make an album to tell the story of your day that will last for generations.
And take it from someone that knows, if you don’t print your photos in the first couple months after receiving them, odds are pretty good that you won’t ever get to it. FYI, I’m very happy to help you with an album or prints if you need it!
- Enjoy them!
I could go on for a couples hours about why I think wedding photos are important. But I’ll refrain and keep it brief.
Here’s the thing, your wedding day is one of the few moments in your life that you get to truly, unapologetically make entirely about you and your partner. You get to celebrate the connection you have and the commitment you’ve made to one another. You get to make promises to each other to honor and foster that connection and continue building and growing in to the future. And you get to surround yourself with the people most important to you to support and love on you through out it all.
And here’s a secret in case you don’t already know. Marriage can be really tough. It’s beautiful and important and absolutely worth pursuing. But sharing your life with someone else means that you don’t just share the highs and the holidays and amazing memories. You also share the tough stuff, the arguments and misunderstandings. There are gonna be times where you simply aren’t on the same page and it doesn’t feel as easy as it used to. That’s ok. It’s part of the deal.
This is where I truly believe that these photos can serve as a very powerful tool to remind you of what you have in each other. That what you have is unique and rare and worth celebrating in the good times and worth fighting for in the hard times. These photos of friends and family coming together to support that love can be strong reminders of what you are so lucky to have.
So I recommend taking the time to sit down every once in a while and flip through these photos. Maybe it’s on your anniversary every year. Maybe it’s a date night here and there. But remember that your wedding isn’t simply about the event on that day, it’s also, and probably more so, about setting you up for a successful marriage filled with love and trust and with that comes work. I believe your photos can play a part in that.
