Wedding Photo Sharing Tips

Wedding Photos

After your wedding, you’ll want to share both the gorgeous collection of photos taken by your wedding photographer during your Big Day, and the photos you took at your pre-wedding parties, your after-party, the morning-after breakfast and all of the moments in between. Your guests will be eager to see your wedding portraits, and guests too will want to share the photos they took.

With so many photos to share, you’ll find there are two different sharing plans to establish. The first is the traditional photo-sharing method enacted by your professional wedding photographer. He or she will create an online gallery of all of your photos, categorized into pre-wedding, ceremony, reception and portraits, and post it with an access code so that only you and your guests can view the photos from your event.

Professional photographers will most often give you pre-printed cards including the gallery URL and your event code, and you’ll place these cards at guest tables or by the guest book at your wedding venue. Guests can then take and keep these cards so that they can view all of the professionally-taken photos in your album, use the interactive tools to see the photos in black and white, color and sepia, and order their own prints and enlargements.

You can also order your prints and especially photos you’ll give to your parents, grandparents and bridal party members as gifts. A top wedding trend is to send the link and code to your other wedding professionals, so that they too may see your gallery and request permission from your photographer to showcase your photos on their site or blog. And it’s always nice to enclose a photo or two with your thank-you notes to your vendors after your wedding day.

For non-professionally-taken wedding photos, including your own and those taken by guests, there are several photo-sharing options to explore. Some of our New Jersey and New York City wedding couples say they create private Facebook groups to view their personal collections of wedding photos, allowing them to control who gets to see their pictures. This prevents hurt feelings of other people on their Facebook friends list who weren’t invited to the wedding.

You can also use an online photo-sharing site. Shutterfly Share lets you upload your photos and video onto a private gallery, which you can then share with your friends and family. When you email your guests to view this gallery, you can also remind them of the professional photographer’s online album URL and password code. Keep in mind whenever you use online photo-share sites that you’ll need to have the ability to upload a large number of high-resolution images, which takes up a lot of space. Read the fine print of any online photo-share sites to be sure that site does indeed provide you with the file sizes you need, if not unlimited storage space. Check also about print and disc prices to choose the best program.

Our brides and grooms have also mentioned the photo-sharing programs on Flickr, Picasa albums, MobileMe, and iRave, a newer site that gives you the ability to approve any images uploaded by wedding guests so that you can potentially nix any unflattering or embarrassing photos before they go into the group gallery of shared photos.

At our elegant wedding venue in northern New Jersey, we’ve seen our wedding couples encourage guests who are taking pictures to Instagram them using a special hashtag that they’ve set, such as #DougandJulieWedding.

Keep in mind that many guests will post photos of the wedding venue,  wedding catering, bridal party group photos and you on Facebook and Twitter during the wedding itself, so be sure to look back at their accounts after you return from your honeymoon to see those fun, in-the-moment photos that received so many fun and wonderful comments, like ‘look at that cocktail party food!’ Wedding food images are among the most popular photos shared on social media, and may even find their way to Pinterest wedding boards, so be sure to look for shares of your wedding elements and you may find images you’ll want to save and print out for your own albums.

And of course, for relatives who are not online, print out some photos and wedding photo booth pictures so that they too may have keepsakes from the big day.