After the wedding: collecting the photos and keeping them safe

This is part four of The wedding photo plan. The first three parts covered planning, from your photo priorities to the family photo list. This part starts the morning after.

In the weeks after a wedding, your photos are in more places than they will ever be again: dozens of guests' phones, your photographer's memory cards, a videographer's drives, a few group chats. Some of those places are temporary. The job now is to get everything into one place you control, and then make sure that place is not the only copy.

Send one message the day after

Guests are most willing to share photos in the first day or two, while they are still scrolling through them. After a couple of weeks the photos are buried under new ones, and asking again feels awkward.

Send one message the day after, to everyone at once, with a single place to send photos and a date to do it by. Two to three weeks is long enough for someone to find a quiet evening and short enough that it stays on their list. One reminder a few days before the deadline is plenty. Our guide to how to collect wedding photos from guests has wording for the message and compares the usual ways of gathering photos.

Two things that guide does not cover:

• Ask specific people for specific things. You probably know who filmed the speeches, who was next to you during the vows and who stayed on the dance floor until the end. A personal message ("did you get the moment Grandad started dancing?") gets a better response than a general one.
• Help the people who will not manage a link. Older relatives often took some of the most touching photos. Ask a younger family member to upload them, or sit down with their phone next time you visit.

If you used Happily on the day

If guests already added photos during the wedding through a Happily gallery, the follow-up message is simple: send the same link again. Guests do not need an account or the app, and what they add now goes into the same event as the photos shared on the day.

Before you go through it all, know what the free event and the Event Pass each include:

• On a free event, the first 100 photos guests add are shown in the shared gallery. Further photos and all videos are still accepted, and nobody sees an upload fail. They are kept in your private vault, the owner's side of the event.
• The Event Pass is a one-time purchase for that event, not a subscription. It reveals everything in the vault, including video, and lets you download originals in full quality as ZIP files.
• Hosting is time-limited: 90 days after the event for a free event, and 24 months with the Event Pass, which you can extend a year at a time.

Treat any gallery, ours included, as the place where you gather the photos rather than where you keep them. With the Event Pass, download the originals before hosting ends and put them into the backup described below.

Waiting for the professional gallery

Professional galleries take time, and delivery windows vary between photographers. Four to eight weeks is common, and some photographers take several months in the peak of the season. Your contract should give a date; if it does not, ask for one in writing.

Many photographers send a small set of preview images within the first week. Enjoy those, but hold off starting an album with them: the full gallery often has pictures you like more.

Video usually takes longer than photos, because editing a film is slower work. Our post on whether you need a wedding videographer covers what the usual deliverables are, if you are not sure what to expect.

While you wait, sort the guest photos. When the professional gallery arrives, you will be ready to put the two together.

When the gallery arrives, download everything

Photographers usually deliver through an online gallery with a download option. That gallery is a delivery method, not an archive. Many are only kept online for a set period, and even the ones that stay depend on the photographer keeping their account.

As soon as the gallery arrives:

1. Download the full-resolution files, not only the web-size versions.
2. Check the count against what the gallery says it holds, and open a sample of files to make sure they downloaded properly.
3. Note how long the gallery stays online, and put a reminder in your calendar a month before it closes.
4. If you ordered video, download the full-quality files as well as any streaming link.

Back up properly: the 3-2-1 rule

The rule photographers use for their own work is called 3-2-1:

• Three copies of everything: the working copy plus two backups.
• Two different kinds of storage, for example a computer and an external drive.
• One copy somewhere else: a cloud backup, or a drive kept at a parent's house.

For a couple, that can be as simple as this: the wedding folder on your computer, a copy on an external drive, and a copy in a cloud storage service you already pay for. Organise the folder before you copy it: one subfolder for the professional photos, one for the video, and one for guest photos, with a subfolder per guest if you like.

Two mistakes are common. The first is treating a single cloud account as a backup; if it is the only copy and the account is lost or closed, so are the photos. The second is relying on the photographer's gallery link, which may expire, or on the photographer's own archive, which they are rarely obliged to keep. Check your backup once a year by opening a few files from each copy.

Before next week

Send the message to your guests, check your photographer's delivery date, and set up the three copies before the professional gallery arrives. Next week, the final part of the series turns everything you have gathered into an album, prints for the family and a way to share the day with the people who could not be there.