Sharing wedding photos with vendors: who wants what
Sharing wedding photos with vendors: who wants which frames, what you may send, and why the guest photographs are the set they cannot get anywhere else.
September 30, 20265 min read
Six weeks after the wedding you will get a polite email from the florist, and possibly the venue, the band and the person who made the cake, asking whether you have any photographs. They are not being pushy. Photographs of their work at a real wedding are the only marketing most of them have, and they cannot take those photographs themselves because they were working.
This is how to do it well in twenty minutes, what you are allowed to send and what you are not, and the thing most couples do not realise: the photographs your vendors most want are often not in the professional gallery at all. They are in the ones your guests took.
Sharing wedding photos with vendors: who wants what
Each vendor wants a different slice, and sending everyone the whole gallery helps nobody. A florist wants the bouquet in daylight, the table arrangements before anyone sat down, and the arch. A venue wants wide shots of the rooms full of people, the terrace at golden hour, and the dance floor at night. A band wants the dance floor. A baker wants the cake before the knife.
| Vendor | What they actually want | Where it usually is |
|---|---|---|
| Florist | bouquet, arrangements, arch, all in daylight before the room filled | professional set, the getting-ready and empty-room frames |
| Venue | rooms full, terrace at dusk, dance floor at night, the view | half professional, half guests, because the photographer left before the room was at its fullest |
| Band or DJ | the dance floor with people on it, close, from inside the crowd | almost entirely guest photographs and video |
| Cake, stationery, hair and make-up | one clean frame of the work itself, plus one of it in use | professional set, the detail frames |
| Photographer | nothing from you, but a review and a tag when you post | not applicable |
Twenty minutes: open the gallery, pick five to ten frames per vendor from the column that fits, and send each a link to just those. A folder per vendor beats one link to everything, because a florist who has to scroll through six hundred photographs to find eight will not, and because the professional's contract usually restricts what you may pass on.
What you may send, and what you may not
Read the photography contract before you forward anything. Almost every one grants you a personal-use licence, which covers printing, sharing with family and posting on your own accounts. It usually does not cover a vendor using the photographs in their advertising, which is what a vendor asking for photographs intends to do.
The clean way is to tell the vendor who the photographer was and let the two of them arrange it. Most photographers will happily send a vendor a small set with a credit, because it is exposure for them too. Some ask for a fee. Either way it is their call, not yours, and forwarding the files with "do whatever you like" puts the vendor in an awkward position later.
Guest photographs are a different matter. Your guests took them, and a guest's snapshot of the dance floor is theirs to give. Ask the guest if the frame is recognisably one person's work and they are in it. Otherwise a general "the band would love to use a few of these" in the gallery or the group chat is enough, and nobody has ever minded. Wedding photos and guest privacy has the longer version of what is and is not reasonable to do with photographs other people took.
The set your vendors cannot get anywhere else
The photographer leaves at ten. The band plays until three. The venue is at its fullest and best at half past midnight, when nobody paid to hold a camera is in the building. Every vendor whose work happens at night has the same problem, which is that the professional record of their work stops before their work does.
Your guests were there. The dance floor at midnight, the terrace with everyone on it, the band from two metres away, the venue lit as the venue intended, are all on eighty phones. If you collected them, you have the only photographs of the second half of the night, and they are exactly the ones the band and the venue will use. The last hour of the wedding is about that stretch, and wedding video from guests about the videos, which a band wants more than anything.
Guest photographs are also unlicensed in the way that matters here. Nobody's contract restricts them, the guest who took them usually says yes without being asked twice, and a vendor can post them the same week. For a band or a venue, twelve guest photographs of a full dance floor are worth more than any number of empty-room frames, however beautifully lit.
How to send them
- One message per vendor, one link per vendor, five to ten photographs. Say which are the professional's and who they were, so the vendor knows whom to credit and whom to ask for more.
- Send the full-size files, not screenshots and not the compressed versions from a chat app. A photograph a vendor will print or post needs the original.
- Do it in the first month. Vendors post real weddings while the season is on, and a set that arrives in February is a set that waits until next summer.
- Say what you liked. A sentence about the arrangement that everybody noticed or the song that filled the floor goes into their review page and their next pitch, and it is the thing they cannot make themselves.
If the guest photographs are in a shared gallery, the fastest version of all this is to give the vendor the gallery's download for the frames you choose, which needs no re-uploading. How the gallery works covers what a download looks like on the other side. And if you never collected them, the vendors' emails are one more reason the next couple should.