A lot of new services are popping up that try to help you gather your wedding guests' photos. Honestly, Matt and I had a pretty easy time doing it ourselves by working through these specific steps:
With this approach, we ended up with more than 2,000 photos!
Any other ideas for getting photos from guests?
- We created a centralized Flickr account (using a new e-mail address and password that we were comfortable sharing with our guests). We had to upgrade to a Pro account, in order to avoid any upload restrictions.
- We shared this information with our guests on our wedsite in advance, in order to give them a heads-up that we wanted them to bring their digital cameras/phones and snap away!
- We sent a mass e-mail after the wedding to remind everyone to upload their photos. Again, we gave them the log-in information and step-by-step directions about how to upload their photos.
- We asked a couple of people directly to take photos and upload them to the site. We found the personal request to be much more effective than mass announcements on our wedsite or e-mails.
With this approach, we ended up with more than 2,000 photos!
Any other ideas for getting photos from guests?
11 comments:
You were smart to think of this well in advance. There is a website called The Wedding Lens that specializes in this, too.
Wow! Great idea! Saw that someone did something similar on a recent grad post on APW. We will most definitely have to do this.
Would it be more difficult for guests to upload pics if you didn't upgrade to a Pro account?
We did essentially the same thing with Snapfish, but I also printed out small cards to have at the reception, so that people could take those home as well.
It was great for us to see the pictures, but I have a lot of family far away, so it was a way for them to see the pictures as well.
Hi, Angie: When I was looking into flickr two years ago, there were limitations on how many photos could be uploaded per month. Since everyone would pretty much be uploading their photos at the same time, this wouldn't have worked. That's why we upgraded to the Pro. Hope that helps!
@Sara- Sweet! Thank you!
Well, what a great idea. Tucking this one away. A lot of my friends are great amateur photographers and I'd love to have their pics.
Great ideas!
This isn't totally related, but I wanted to share an idea that a friend of mine used to get great photos of all of their wedding guests. He has a really fancy digital slr camera. For about $20 he bought a remote control for the shutter. He set his camera up on a tripod with good lighting, put some tape down to show people where to stand, and put the remote control out so that people could just stand in front of the nice background and snap a photo of themselves. I saw the photos and they were amazing. People look so relaxed and happy because they are posing themselves and taking their own pictures with the remote (with a really great camera). They printed the pics and sent them as thank-yous to their guests.
-Kristen
I tried this, and it didn't work for me. I bought the pro account, sent out emails, posted it on the website, and reminded people. There are currently, 6 months later, 43 pictures in the stream, all from one person.
If you're planning on using this to add to what your professional photographer is doing, as we did, then 43 pictures is fine. If you were expecting these to be your only pictures of the wedding, it would be a huge deal.
So, if you're hoping to have friends and family photograph your wedding, you should definitely be sure that you know who's taking pictures and that they know it's important to you.
A wedding I was at recently had a friend of the groom's set up with a laptop and card reader, so they could get your photos from you before you left the wedding. It seemed to work pretty well.
I recently created Every Single Shot ( http://everysingleshot.com ) for exactly this! It's made specifically for weddings, so everything is private, guest reminders are sent automatically, and you even get your own web address for your photo album.
Feel free to give Every Single Shot a look. :)
Jon
EverySingleShot.com
Your Wedding, Their Photos
Sounds like a great idea! I like the idea of setting up a laptop and card reader to get the photos before the guest leave. We all have good intentions but all have busy lives and its easy to forget
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