When you get your wedding gallery back and you have upwards of 300 images to sift through, choosing just 50 favourites to immortalise in your wedding album can seem a daunting task. Hopefully you will have too many favourites to choose from – this is a good problem to have! Here is a quick run down of how to break the task up to make it a little bit easier.
Before we get started it’s helpful to know roughly how many images will fit comfortably in your album. For a 10×10 inch wedding album or book with 20 spreads (40 pages) which is my default I would recommend selecting between 50-60 images. If you end up wanting more images you can always add more pages (think along the lines of 1.5 images per page).
How to use your Pic-Time gallery to track your image choices
1. If you haven’t already, please fill in my ‘I would like to order a wedding album’ form (see bottom of page if you need it). Once I’ve had this from you I will send you a personal invitation via Pic-Time to select your album images. This particular way of entering the gallery makes it extra easy for you to send me your choices so I recommend doing it this way.
2. Enter the gallery via the invite I send you and you will see a flag icon. When you click on it you will be able to see the number of photos you’ve selected throughout the process.
3. I will always allow you to select more images than you may need but just keep in mind how many will fit comfortably in your album and that going over the recommended amount may mean you’ll need extra pages.
A rough guide for choosing your images
When I am shooting a wedding I am trying to tell the story of your day through images. You might want to think of your album choices reflecting this too. It’s not so much an exercise in including every single person or every single moment and images you think you SHOULD have but more about choosing images that really appeal to you from each part of the day. Maybe they make you laugh, or get a bit teary or they just make you feel something. Those are the images that will keep you picking up your album over and again.
As such my general feeling is to go with your gut but in order to help you reign in your choices here is one way of dividing up your choices throughout the day.
Just as an aside this guide has been written for a ‘typical’ wedding day shoot which is around 8 hours worth of coverage from getting ready to dancing. If your coverage was longer or shorter or if you didn’t include some of these typical parts of the day you’ll need to juggle this accordingly!
1. Without even looking through your gallery are there five images that come to mind straight away as absolute favourites? Maybe they’re pictures of particular people, particular moments that stood out to you when you first got to see them. Select those first! They stand out to you for a reason.
2. Pick five images from the getting ready section.
3. Pick six images from the wedding ceremony.
4. Pick two confetti shots.
5. Pick six group shots.
6. Pick six images from the wedding reception.
7. Pick five images from dinner and speeches.
8. Pick two first dance images.
9. Pick six images of dancing.
10. Pick five detail images you love (ie. pictures of things rather than people)
If you follow this you should have 48 images and you can add or take away as much as you like til you’re happy with the collection. As I say there is no right or wrong way to do this and no one stop fits all but this is a good place to start.
Once you are happy with your selection click ‘send to photographer’. This will automatically send me your choices and from there I will start designing your album. You’ll have two opportunities to review the layout and then we’ll send off to print and you’ll have a beautiful new album with you in 7 weeks.
