Are Your Wedding Photos Late? Here’s what to do!
It’s drilled in time and time again – the only thing you have left after your wedding day is your wedding photos and your dress. So what do you do when your wedding photographer is late with photos?
After promising to deliver your wedding photos by a particular date, they didn’t, and now your wedding photos are late.
This happened to one of our brides recently. She wrote:
“We got married around eight weeks ago and were told that our photos would take four weeks. We emailed them to see where they were at (we knew our photogs had gone away over the holidays but said there was no pressure from our end). They replied, saying they aimed to send them to us by the end of January, which has now been gone, and there are still no photos.
We want our photos, so we want to get our thank you cards done, which require high-resolution images. I feel like we are being rude to our guests, but I also don’t want to be a nag to our photographer. However, we also paid $3000 for the service. Am I being impatient?”
Why do wedding photos take so long
The core issue here wasn’t the amount of time they were waiting for their wedding photos; it was that they’d been promised them by a certain date and are still waiting. The wedding photographer should’ve kept up clear communication.
Some brides commented on the original post with stories of photos turned around within a week – that is possible with some photographers, but it’s not realistic for everyone. The thing is, professional wedding photographers don’t just turn up to your wedding, take some shots then send them to you.
There’s actually quite a bit of back-office editing, color correction, and tweaking that goes into producing beautiful wedding photos. If it’s the middle of wedding season (late spring through to early fall) then they’ll be editing other weddings too.
Average time to get wedding photos back
Photographer Kate Groundwater of Still Waters Photography said that 8 weeks is fine to wait for delivery – but it’s about managing expectations. She has a timeline in her contract so couples know her turnaround time and said “…it’s not cool, however, to promise a delivery date and then not deliver”.
Advice for future brides
For future brides, our advice would be:
- ensure there’s a delivery date set in your contract, so that you have some paperwork to back it up if your wedding photos are late.
- Be patient (easier said than done, I know). You want your photos to be their absolute best, not rushed through because you kept harping on.
- If you get specific shots taken for your thank you cards, ask your photographer if you can get those ones first, so your thank you cards can go out as soon as possible.
- Don’t be afraid to follow up with your photographer if it’s longer than promised – and if it’s the height of wedding season, a phone call may be better than an email. Emails can get buried under the mountain of enquiries and messages that come in daily, whereas a phone call is immediate.