A checklist for the day you hand over a wedding

Delivery is the last thing a couple experiences of working with you, and it is usually the least designed part of the job. Months of shooting and editing end in a link pasted into an email at eleven at night.

This is the checklist I would want taped to the monitor.

Before you send anything

Watch it as they will. Open the gallery on a phone, on cellular, the way they will open it in bed the evening it arrives. Not on your calibrated 27-inch display on a wired connection. Most delivery problems are visible in thirty seconds on a phone and invisible everywhere else.

Check the first screen. Whatever loads first is the answer to “how did it turn out?” If the first thing they meet is a folder listing or a login prompt, you have buried the moment you spent months earning. Their names, the date, and the film — in that order, before any admin.

Say how much there is. “412 photographs” prevents the couple stopping at forty, assuming that’s everything, and emailing you three days later asking where the rest is.

Naming and grouping

Group by moment, not by camera or card: getting ready, ceremony, portraits, speeches, party. Nobody has ever wanted a folder called A7IV_CARD2.

Keep the group names in the couple’s language, not the trade’s. “First look” is fine because they’ve heard it from you all year. “Golden hour” is fine. “B-roll” is not.

If there is a highlight film and a full ceremony film, make it obvious which is which and how long each one is. A couple who accidentally starts the fifty-minute ceremony edit while showing friends at a dinner party will not finish it.

Downloads

This is where studios lose the most time to avoidable email.

Decide before you send, not after. Changing the rules once a couple has the link means answering questions about why something worked yesterday.

Give them the real file. If your gallery quietly hands over a resized JPEG when someone clicks download, you will hear about it — usually from whoever is making the album, usually in a year, usually with an edge to it. The file they download should be the file you uploaded.

Consider staging it. Web-sized files for sharing now, full-resolution once you have been paid or once the album selection is done, is a completely reasonable policy as long as you say so on the page.

Favourites are a working tool. If the couple can mark the photographs they love, that list is your album shortlist and it costs you nothing to collect.

The settings that cause support emails

Expiry. An expired link is worse than no link, because it fails at exactly the moment the couple is showing someone. If you set one, make it long, tell them the date on the page, and email before it lapses. Consider not setting one at all — the storage is cheaper than the relationship.

Passwords. Reasonable for a private ceremony, unnecessary friction for most weddings. If you use one, put it in the same message as the link. A password sent separately “for security” will be lost by the weekend.

Watermarks. Fine on previews while a gallery is still being decided on. Never on the files they download after paying. And check what your watermark does to a vertical crop before you trust it across four hundred images.

Ask for the review at the peak

The single highest-return thing on this list: the couple is happier about your work in the ten minutes after they open the gallery than they will ever be again.

That is when to ask for the Google review. Not in a follow-up email a fortnight later, when the wedding is over and the thank-you cards are done and your message is one of forty in an inbox they are avoiding.

Put the ask on the page, after they’ve watched. One line, one link, no form.

After you send

Confirm it arrived. Wedding galleries are unusually good at landing in spam — big images, unfamiliar sender, a link. A short personal message from your own address, at your own domain, does better than an automated one from a platform they’ve never heard of.

Expect one revision. Somebody will be missing from the speeches, or there will be one photograph of an aunt mid-blink that they’d rather not have. Treating it as normal rather than as a complaint is most of the work; having somewhere for that request to land, rather than an email you forward to your editor, is the rest.

Keep it up. Couples come back to a wedding gallery on anniversaries, and they send it to family for years. A link that still works in three years is quiet, cheap marketing.

The short version

Watch it on a phone. Lead with their names and the film. Group by moment. Give them the real files. Skip the expiry. Ask for the review while they’re smiling.

The mechanics of the handover matter more than the last ten percent of the grade, because the handover is the part they experience directly. If you want the round before this one, see how to run a revision round, or read what a branded gallery changes.