Your gallery arrives with about seven hundred photographs in it. Forty of them will go in the album. Perhaps six will be printed large. Which raises a question nobody asks me until months later: what is everything else for?
It is a fair question, and “the archive” is a lazy answer. Here is what I actually tell couples to do.
Do the first pass badly, on purpose
Go through the gallery once, quickly, in one sitting, and favourite anything that makes you feel something. Do not think about walls, albums or anyone else’s opinion. Do not go back. Twenty minutes, no editing.
You will end up with somewhere between eighty and a hundred and fifty. That set is more useful than any careful selection you could make, because it is the only one made purely on instinct.
The photograph you will still want in twenty years is almost never the one you chose carefully. It is the one you stopped on.
Then leave it alone for a month
Genuinely. The gallery is too close to the day for the first few weeks — everything feels significant because you remember standing there. Come back in a month and the favourites list will have sorted itself out.
Four jobs for the other six hundred
Give them away in sets. Not the whole link, which nobody works through. Pull twenty photographs that a particular person is in, and send those. Your mother does not want seven hundred photographs. She wants the eleven with her sister in them.
Print small, print a lot. A box of a hundred 5×7 prints costs very little and is the single most-handled object I know of. It lives in a drawer, comes out at Christmas, and gets passed around a table in a way an album never quite does.
Use them across the year. Thank-you cards, the first anniversary, a birthday for whoever is in the frame. Two or three photographs at a time, sent to one person who will care.
Keep the boring ones. The room before anyone arrived. The table settings. The car. Nobody wants those now. In fifteen years they will be the only record of what that place looked like, and they are the frames people ask me for most often, years later.
The detail frames nobody chooses. Ask me again in fifteen years.
Back it up properly, once
I keep your files for three years. That is a courtesy, not an archive, and you should not rely on it. Take an hour, once, and do this:
- Download the full-resolution gallery to your computer, not just your phone.
- Copy that folder to an external drive and put the drive somewhere else — a parent’s house, a desk drawer at work.
- Put the same folder in whichever cloud service you already pay for.
- Write the year in the folder name. You will thank yourself.
Three copies, two kinds of media, one of them somewhere else. It is the rule professional archives use and it takes an evening.
What not to do
Do not post all seven hundred anywhere. Not because of me — they are your photographs and the printing rights are yours outright. Because a wedding gallery dumped whole into an album online is the fastest way to make people stop looking at it.
Choose thirty. People will actually see thirty.
— Amanda