The wedding photo checklist nobody gives you

Everything about photographing a wedding is planned except the largest part of it. Your photographer has a contract, a timeline and a list. The hundred phones in the room have nobody thinking about them at all, and between them they will take several times as many pictures.

None of what follows is difficult and most of it is a sentence said out loud at the right moment. It is written as dates because that is the only form in which any of it actually gets done.

What a wedding photo checklist is actually for

It exists to stop one specific outcome, which is common and which nobody notices happening. You get forty photographs, you assume that is how many people took, and the other four hundred stay on the phones of guests who meant to send them and never did.

That failure is silent. Nobody tells you that eleven guests could not work out where to put things. Nobody reports that the video of the speeches was too big to send and was quietly abandoned. You find out, if you find out at all, when you go looking for a specific moment a year later and it is not there.

So the whole job is removing friction and asking at the right time. Those are the only two levers, and neither of them costs money.

Six weeks out: decide what you are collecting

Pick the method now, while there is time to change your mind. The test is not which one has the best features. It is which one asks the least of a sixty-year-old guest holding a drink at nine in the evening, because that is the person who decides whether this works.

Anything requiring an install or an account will lose a chunk of the room, and the chunk it loses is not random. Whatever you choose, find its limits deliberately rather than during the reception. What free tiers actually include goes through the five places they usually stop, and whether video counts against you is the one worth checking hardest.

Decide the phone question at the same time. Not as one decision but as two: the ceremony and everything after it. Why the ceremony and the reception need opposite answers is the whole argument, and getting it wrong in the cautious direction costs you more than getting it wrong in the other.

Two weeks out: print, and test on a phone that is not yours

Print one card before you print a hundred. Then hand it to somebody who does not know what it is for and watch them without helping. If they hesitate, the card is wrong, and the fix is ten minutes now rather than a hundred useless cards on the tables.

Test on an older phone in bad light, because yours has the best camera in the family and has already scanned this code. The usual reasons a code fails to scan are the print size, the margin around it and the contrast, in that order, and all three are invisible until somebody else tries.

Work out how many cards you need and where they go while you are at it. One per table is the baseline and it is not enough on its own. Where to put them so guests actually use them makes more difference to the final number of photographs than anything else on this list.

The week of: the sentences somebody has to say

Write down two lines and give them to whoever is holding the microphone. The first is the ceremony one, asked with a reason and an end point. The second is the upload one, later in the evening. The wording that works matters more than it sounds, because several obvious phrasings quietly stop people.

Get the venue wifi details onto the card, and find out whether the network makes people accept terms on a page first. How venue wifi fails at weddings is worth ten minutes now, because on the night the symptom looks exactly like your gallery being broken and nobody will diagnose it correctly at that hour.

Tell your photographer the plan, in one sentence, when you go through the timeline. Nobody minds and one or two will help. Then hand the whole thing to somebody who is not getting married. On the day you will be unavailable in a way you cannot imagine now, and one person who knows where the spare cards are is worth more than any preparation you do yourself.

On the day

Open the gallery in the morning rather than the evening, and put a card wherever people are getting ready. The hours before the ceremony produce photographs nobody thinks to ask for and nobody else is there to take.

Cards out before guests sit down, not after the starter. A card that arrives on a table already covered in glasses is a card that gets moved to the edge and forgotten. During the meal is when people have both hands free and nothing to do, and it is the highest-yield twenty minutes of the entire evening.

Then leave it alone. Do not check the gallery during your own wedding. Somebody else can watch it, and if nothing has arrived by the time the plates are cleared, that person can say the second sentence again rather than you finding out about it on Monday.

Every item on the list above has its own article, for the week you are on it.

1. Unplugged wedding ceremony, plugged-in reception

   An unplugged wedding ceremony protects twenty minutes. Applying the same rule to the whole night costs you every photograph your guests would have taken.

2. Where to put your wedding QR code so guests actually scan it

   A wedding QR code works or fails on placement, size and light. Five rules that decide it, and the two spots that quietly waste the card.

3. Wedding QR code not scanning? Start here

   A wedding QR code not scanning is nearly always the print, the margin or the light rather than the code. Four checks, in order of likelihood.

4. What to say so guests upload wedding photos

   The line on the card and the line during the speeches. Two sentences decide whether guests upload wedding photos, and most weddings say neither.

5. Wedding venue wifi is bad. Plan for it.

   Wedding venue wifi fails at exactly the wrong hour. How to test it properly, what to do instead, and why photographs are not lost when it drops.

6. How long to keep wedding photos online

   Couples ask how long to keep wedding photos online and the honest answer is that it is the wrong question. What matters is how soon you get them off.

7. What free wedding photo sharing gets you

   Free wedding photo sharing is real, and every service draws its line somewhere. Here are the five places the line usually sits, and how to find yours early.

The morning after, and the fortnight after

Ask once more the next morning, wherever people are having breakfast or saying goodbye. This is the single most underused moment in the whole process. People are going through their photographs anyway, they are on a proper connection, and the night is still the only thing anyone is talking about.

Then put one thing in the calendar for the second weekend after the wedding: download everything, at full quality, in one go, on a real computer. Not on your phone and not in a cafe. Open two or three of the videos afterwards and confirm they play, because video is the material most likely to have gone wrong on the way up.

That is the end of the list, and the reason it ends there is that a gallery is a collection point rather than an archive. How long to keep the gallery open turns out to be the wrong question once you have the files, and setting the whole thing up takes about ten minutes if you are doing it for the first time.