What to do if you hate your wedding photos

You opened the gallery, went through it once, and felt your stomach drop. It is more common than anybody admits, and it is almost never talked about because it feels ungrateful, or vain, or like an accusation against somebody you liked. So couples sit with it.

This is the practical version. How to work out whether the problem is the photographs or the first look at them, what a photographer can actually do about it, what they cannot, and the second set of photographs from your wedding that most couples in this position have not opened.

First: wait a week, and look again on a different screen

The first viewing of a wedding gallery is not a fair one. You are looking for yourself, you are comparing every frame to the twelve best from other people's weddings that you have seen this year, and you are doing it on a phone in bed. Almost everyone dislikes something on the first pass, and most of it is not the photographs.

So close it. Come back in a week, on a laptop, in daylight, with your partner, and go through it once without stopping. Then ask a different question: not "do I look how I wanted to look" but "is this what the day was like". If the answer to the second question is yes, the photographs are probably fine and the feeling is about you, which is a real feeling and a different problem.

If the answer is still no, you have something concrete to say, and the next section is how to say it.

What to do if you hate your wedding photos and the problem is real

Separate the problem into one of three kinds, because each has a different fix and a photographer can only act on one you have named.

Editing complaints are the easiest and the most common. A photographer's style is a set of choices applied to hundreds of frames, and a couple who booked on the strength of bright airy portfolio images and received a dark moody gallery has a fair point. Most photographers keep the unedited files and can re-grade. Ask for three or four frames redone first so you can see whether the fix is the fix.

How to say it

In writing, once, specific, and without the word "hate". "The photographs from the ceremony feel much darker than the ones on your website, is a lighter edit possible?" is something a professional can answer. "We are so disappointed" is something they can only apologise for.

Name the frames. Gallery numbers or filenames. Say what you like as well as what you do not, honestly, because a photographer who hears that the portraits are exactly right and the reception is the problem knows where to look. Then ask what they would suggest. Most have handled this before and have an answer ready, and the ones who get defensive tell you something too.

Keep the contract to hand but do not lead with it. It usually says the photographer's artistic judgement is final, which is true and also not the end of the conversation. Almost every photographer would rather spend an evening re-editing than have an unhappy couple, and the ones who will not are rare.

The set you have not opened

Here is the part most couples in this position skip. Your wedding was photographed by eighty people, not one. If you collected the guest photographs, there are several hundred more frames of the same day, taken from angles the photographer did not have, at moments the photographer was not there for, and none of them were edited into a style you did not choose.

That set has different strengths. It is not consistent and it is not flattering in the way a portrait is. But the moment you felt was missing is very often in it, three times, from three tables. The cake cut from the side. Your grandmother laughing at the table. The speech from where the audience was sitting. How guest photographs and a photographer's work fit together is about exactly this, and this is the situation where it stops being theory.

If you did not collect them, it is not too late for the fortnight after. Guests still have everything on their phones and a message asking for their photographs, sent once with a link to somewhere they can put them, gets a real response in the first two weeks. What to say so guests upload has the wording, and it works after the wedding almost as well as during it.

What not to do

• Do not post a review before the conversation. Most of these situations resolve, and a review written in the first week is one you cannot take back.
• Do not re-edit the photographs yourself with a phone filter and call it fixed. It compresses them, it looks like what it is, and it makes a later re-edit by the photographer harder to compare.
• Do not book a second shoot in the first month. Some couples do a newlywed session later and love it, but as a reaction to disappointment it tends to produce photographs of two people trying not to be disappointed.
• Do not decide alone. Your partner may like the photographs you dislike, and somebody who was not at the wedding will see them without the day in their head, which is how everybody else will see them for the next forty years.

Most couples who felt this way come round to the gallery within a few months, once the day has settled and the photographs have stopped competing with the memory. The ones who do not usually had a real editing problem, and got it fixed by asking. Either way, the next thing to do is the same as for everyone: download everything and back it up, because these are still the only photographs of the day you will ever have, and time is kinder to them than the first week was.