Wedding Photos and What To Do With Them

You know how I went on and on about how great it was that we sent out blank cds to collect everyone's pictures from our wedding? Well, after I wrote that post I thought to myself, "You know, I should really do something with those. It's been more than a year and I haven't even really gone through all of them." The nice people at Blurb had given me a $60 gift certificate to make a book and they're doing free shipping right now, so I decided to sit down yesterday and make myself put all of those wedding pictures into some sort of organized album.

Holy heck.

I sat down yesterday afternoon with the thought that I would just make a simple album (no text) and that way I'd at least have all the photos in a book. I started pulling photos from the various folders and hard drives that they ended up on and finally got them all into one place. And you know what? There were 5,296. FIVE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY SIX PHOTOS!

That, in case you were wondering, is far too many photos.



It doesn't surprise me that there were still folders and photos I hadn't gone through because apparently there was an avalanche of "capturing the moment" going on during my wedding. It was sort of fun to see all of it, but I was also super sick of my wedding last night at 8 PM. And at 11 PM. And at 3 AM.

But I got 'er done.

I narrowed it down to about 950 photos and got them into a softcover album that will be 260 pages of memories. Yes, I know that it sounds like that's still way too much, but I really got a kick out of including photos from all different people because there was such a wide variety. A few people who came to the wedding are amateur photographers with really nice cameras, but most people just had regular digital cameras. Some of them apparently had really, really bad disposable cameras. And the rest had their iPhones.

The result? This sort of quirky, fun, vintage-ish type gallery album that reminds me of the snapshots I used to look at in my parent's album. I left the vast majority of the photos alone, so the fuzziness and overexposure and dust spots and poor cropping are all there. It's great, because our two wedding albums are going to be the same size, but one will have all of those gorgeous, retouched photos from the Roots and the other will have all of these other amateur shots from the people we love.

This is a great idea if you don't know what to do with all of your candids or if you aren't making a Blurb book because your photographer is handling your wedding album. Blurb books are easy to make and they really are very reasonably priced. I've ordered about ten different books from them by now and I've never been disappointed and (from what I've seen on the forums) neither have any of the other Disney brides who use their services. Yay, Blurb! (And thanks for the gift certificate!!!!!)

I didn't do screenshots of the whole book, but I did pull a bunch of it into a slideshow so you can get a preview. I'll also add some of the images below for people who don't have the Internet speed to support the slideshow.