Your wedding day was much anticipated & it was perfect!
It ALSO flew by faster than you could have ever imagined.
You’ve returned from your honeymoon & received your photos back from your photographer – what should you do now?
Here are 6 ideas on what to do with your wedding photos AFTER the wedding.
*updated August 2022

Just over 6 years ago, Derrick was a groomsman in one of his childhood BFF’s wedding days. We booked a hotel & drove up to New York the weekend after Thanksgiving. I was so excited. I am a part of many weddings every year, but it’s rare that I actually get to attend one as a guest.

I’ll never forget: tiny little Braelynn and I dropped Derrick off on Saturday morning so he could get ready with the guys. With a few hours to kill, we went shopping, got lunch, and took a nap (it was delightful). The wedding ceremony was beautiful (even though 18-month-old Braelynn thought it would be fun to cry right as the ceremony was starting, so we spent most of the ceremony doing laps up and down the steps in the foyer).

We got to the reception and Braelynn attempted to steal the spotlight from the bride and groom. She was just so stinking cute! She was coming up on 2 years old at the time, and she just loved all the decorations and lights and the music. She rocked the dance floor all night long.

The wedding photographer and his assistant took a ton of photos of Braelynn – running around the lobby after dinner, stealing cookies from the dessert table, and making her moves on the dance floor. They also took photos of Derrick and I slow-dancing, Derrick and Braelynn dancing together, and at least three posed family photos of all of us all looking at the camera.

Here’s the sad part though: I’ve never seen those photos.

Maybe none of them turned out.
Maybe all of them were blown-out or super dark.
Maybe the photographer’s settings were way out of whack & they were all out-of-focus.
(Maybe the photographer was super old-school & only delivered the bride & groom a physical book of proofs instead of digital images. It is the 21st century, but that doesn’t mean old-school photographers aren’t still out there!)
I might be able to believe all of those things if the photographers had only taken a handful of images of us. But they took way more than a handful.
(Can you feel my heart breaking? I mean, okay, it’s not that bad, but still, it’s sad, right?)

It’s probably because I am a wedding photographer, but I know that a wedding day is so much more than just a bride and groom’s “Day 1”. I mean, obviously the bride and groom are the central focal-points of the day (they are 100% the entire reason everyone is gathered together after all) duh.
But, as a wedding photographer, I take so many photos of people (other than the bride and groom) too! And it breaks my heart to think that those amazing people might never see their images (just like I’ve never seen the images that photographer took of us).

6 Things to do with your Wedding Photos AFTER the Wedding

Share your images!

This one goes without saying (especially after my sad story, right?) Send your friends and family members the link to your gallery – especially your immediate family and close friends who were a part of your bridal party. These are the people who have put not only time and effort, but also money, into being there on your big day. The least you can do is share the gorgeous memories that have been captured.

If you don’t feel like sharing your entire digital gallery, pick out your favorite images and post an album on Facebook. Don’t forget to tag your friends & family members!

Make Thank You Cards

Thank You Cards are a must after every wedding and they can be (let’s just be honest) a drag to write out. It’s a daunting task! The process of handwriting personal messages to all of your guests – it’s hard work! So, why not make the task a little more fun with personalized thank you cards? Have them printed as either postcards or folded-over style and leave them blank on the inside or simply print a generic thank-you message. Don’t forget to leave room to sign your names (that adds a personal touch, especially if you’re going with the generic message) and if you can, also leave a little room to write a specific line of thanks to your guests who traveled from out of town or contributed to the day in some special way.

Go Over-The-Top:

If you have photos of specific guests, print them and put them in your thank you notes!

Print Photos to Display at the Office/On Your Desk

What better way to show off your new “status” as husband/wife? If you work in a customer service job, it’s likely that your customers know you were engaged and planning your wedding. Even if you don’t have any face-to-face communication with the public, showing off your beautiful wedding day to your co-workers is always a ton of fun. Besides, who wouldn’t want to have the memory of their fabulous wedding day sitting right there on their desk to keep them company during those long, boring office days?

Print Photos to Give as Gifts

No matter what time of year you get married, giving photos as gifts for your first Christmas together is the perfect (and oh-so-easy) gift. Getting prints made are fairly cheap and frames can be picked up on sale or with coupons to make the perfect, tear-jerking, happy-memory-bringing gift. Parents and Grandparents especially deserve to have some beautiful photos to display in their homes, but don’t forget siblings & the members of your bridal party! Those photos the photographer took of just you and your bridesmaids/groomsmen – those are meant to be printed and framed to give as a gift!

Print Photos & Create a Gallery Wall at Home

Images were never meant to live on a computer, hard drive, or the cloud. They are just begging to be printed and displayed! So, pick a handful of your favorite images and create an epic gallery wall for your home! Live in an apartment or worried about committing to holes in your wall? Get those Command Strips + Hooks! They work great and are an easy way to get over the anxiety of hanging up images! Print your images & look at them every single day as a reminder of the happiest day of your life!

Order Your Wedding Album (from me!)

What’s better than hanging images of your wedding in your home? Having an incredible, leather, lay-flat album professionally designed & created, of course! Trust me, you can only print and display only so many images (at least without looking like a psycho or them turning into wallpaper) – so an album is the best way to display the most photos. An album tells the story of your day like a gallery wall cannot. Plus – I hate to break it to you (pun totally intended), but pictures you hang on the wall will inevitably fall and get broken. A wedding album is your first family heirloom – you will look at it with your kids and grandkids, it will be a treasured possession that gets handed down thru the generations.

Do you have other ideas or suggestions on what you should do with your wedding photos after the wedding? Leave me a comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Have a friend who has recently been married?
Why not share this post with them to give them a few ideas!