How Many Photos Should a Wedding Gallery Contain?
A few years ago I was looking through my parents’ wedding album. They were married in 1957 and their album contains 24 photos. My Mom remembered how much they paid the photographer, and we figured out that, adjusting for inflation, they paid the equivalent of almost $3000 for those 24 photos. Which I find incredible.
The question of “how many photos” is one that comes up often among wedding photographers and with prospective clients. How many photos is enough, too many, too few? In my opinion, almost all wedding photographers (myself included) err on the side of too many. The digital age made it so easy to take hundreds if not thousands of photos over the course of a wedding day – something that would have been virtually impossible when shooting with film – and photographers started delivering more and more images, simply because they could. No photographer, no matter how skilled, makes hundreds of great photos at a wedding. Good? Probably. Great? Not a chance. Documentary photographer Martin Paar says that if you get one great photo for every 100 you shoot, you are doing well.
But capturing a wedding day is not only about the great photos – it’s about the people who were there, the surroundings they were in and the unexpected moments no one could predict. And so, delivering only the truly, objectively “great” images would also be a disservice to the day.
The trick, then, is to find the middle ground. How many photos tell the story without becoming a still photo version of a wedding video, where every second is another image that appears in the final gallery? What photos will do the job of telling the story in a real and lasting way? At what point does it go from storytelling to a photo dump? (The term “photo dump” is so unappealing and perfect.)
I find that this expectation of many hundreds, or sometimes even thousands, of photos from a wedding is the modern equivalent of the old vacation home movies that were so popular back when camcorders became a thing. If you are old enough, you will no doubt remember jokes made about these vacation videos, and how horrid it was to be made to sit through them. Just because you COULD shoot every moment of your trip to Disneyland doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
There’s a somewhat mediocre movie from 1995 called Strange Days, starring Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett, where people can hook up devices to their brains - similar to VR helmets - that let them relive specific memories, over and over again. Which sounds fun, except that people get addicted to them to the point where they can’t live their real life because they are always yearning for that memory fix. At one point Bassett’s character says to Fiennes, “Memories are meant to fade…they’re designed that way for a reason.”
While that may be a bit of an extreme example in relation to weddings, it relates to the idea that you don’t need a still photo from every second of your wedding day. Or even every minute. In fact, over time, having fewer photos may result in cherishing the day more.
To use another pop culture analogy as illustration, the late, great comedian Norm MacDonald, during his last appearance on the Letterman show, told a joke about photos. He said, “Remember when everyone had one photo of their great grandfather? You’d say to someone, ‘hey, want to see this photo I have of my great grandfather?’ Can you imagine 50 years from now, someone going, ‘Hey, want to see 100,000 photos of my great grandfather?’” Well, no, not really.
When speaking to prospective wedding clients, I try to impress upon them that they are hiring me, not to constantly hit the shutter button on my camera, but instead as a professional who is bringing a creative eye to the day and who will then curate and edit the photos into a gallery. And I’m not talking about 24 images in an album. Those days are gone forever. In my work, I find that 40-50 edited images per hour of shooting is typical. So a gallery from an 8 hour wedding will wind up containing between 350-400 final images. And that is a LOT of photos. I’d love to cut that number in half (and that would still be a lot of photos) but haven’t gotten there yet.
To wedding couples who love the documentary style and are looking for a photographer, here are some tips on how to ensure you get photos you’ll love:
Trust the photographer. They are professionals and they will pick the best images from the day. That’s why you hired them. Let them do their job.
If there are certain people who you’d like to make sure are ‘featured’ in the gallery, point them out at the beginning of the day. And likewise, if there are people who you don’t really know but who are there as plus ones, let the photographer know, because if that person is a fiend on the dance floor or is super gregarious, they’re probably going to wind up in more than a couple of images.
Try and remember this: one great shot of you dancing with your adorable niece, nephew, sibling, daughter, son, etc is, in the long run, better than a second by second photo dump (that horrible, amazing phrase) of the entire dance. In the long run, the limitation will mean you’ll cherish the photo and the memory even more. This applies to every part of the day, not just the dancing.
Do I sound like I’m being negative about you wanting to relive your day moment by moment? If so, that is not my intention. I do want to encourage people to embrace the idea that less really is more when it comes to photos. Some of my couples order albums (Which I highly encourage. No digital image can match the look of a physical photo in an album), and when I design the album for them I ask them to choose between 45-50 images. When they do, I always tell them, “This is your wedding gallery.” Those are the photos they’ll look at over and over. The rest is just filler.
