Last Updated: August 14th, 2020
For new wedding photographers or clients looking to see what is “normal”, it’s a common question to wonder how many photos should be delivered with the wedding photo gallery.
After shooting roughly 50 weddings in our wedding photography career and consulting with some other wedding photographers we know, you can expect roughly 50-100 images per hour of shooting time.
For a standard 8 hour day of wedding photography, this means a photographer should expect to pass along 400-800 photos to their clients.
For more on how we arrive to this number, read our thoughts below!
5 Things to Think About
1). Quality, Not Quantity
In theory, having a lot of photos can seem like a good thing. But, there is certainly a point where the number of photos can be excessive – especially when they seem redundant.
At the average wedding, combined we take roughly 4,000 photos. As a solo wedding photographer, we take about 2,000 images individually.
Most clients would not want all 2,000 or 4,000 of these pictures. That’s crazy!
If you have someone looking to get all the RAW images or something – we would suggest steering clear. We’ll cover the why of this in our next section.
Ultimately – you could deliver less wedding photos than average and still have super happy clients if the photos are all great.
2). Photographers Cull Their Photos
Remember the 4,000 photos we just mentioned that we take during a wedding day? When we get home, we upload them to our computer, then we cull them down to just the “keepers.”
There are plenty of reasons why we want to scale back the images we have taken. These include:
- Removing photos that are unappealing (ie: people making weird faces, poor lighting, etc.)
- Taking out repetitive images (ie: too much reception dancing photos, too many walking down the aisle shots, etc.)
- Removing out of focus and poorly exposed images
This culling process is essential to really any digital wedding photographers workflow. It’s easy to be trigger happy and shoot a lot of pictures – so reducing the number of images you’d want to share with your clients in the end product is key to this process.
3). Photo Storage
With so many photos taken, a good wedding photographer will want to backup their photos.
We begin this process while we are shooting.
We use cameras that allow us to dual write our images to 2 SD cards. This gives us peace of mind that we are not going to lose any images between shooting the wedding and getting them uploaded to our computer at home.
Once home, they are immediately uploaded to our external hard drives as a backup. This is 100% mandatory for any wedding photographer!!
Need help finding the right external HD for you? Check out our 10 Best External Hard Drives for Photographers.
4). Get the Images the Client(s) Want!
While it’s good to know how many photos should be reasonably expected, knowing that you are to deliver ~400-800 photos for a standard wedding day only tells part of the story.
In truth, most clients want a good distribution of images so they encompass ALL of their wedding day effectively. If you provide 5 getting ready photos and 200 reception photos, it may seem that something is a little off.
Keep this in mind when photographing the wedding.
And of course, before the wedding day, consider reaching out to your client(s) directly and asking them what is most important.
You can read about how we use questionnaires to get the most important details from our clients here along with other great wedding photography tips for beginners!
When you fill a wedding gallery with the most important shots and wedding moments for them, they will end up much happier with their images regardless of the number they receive.
5). Showcase the Photos Beautifully
How you display your client’s wedding photos is just as important as the photos you provide them.
We’ve seen some newbie wedding photographers load them into a hard to navigate and visually boring platform like Dropbox. While this is a great cloud storage site for an assortment of files – it’s not so great for making a good first impression.
To get the best bang for our buck, we use dedicated wedding photography online galleries. We switched over to Pic-Time due to some appealing features. You can sign up for Pic-Time today (it’s free to start), and use promo code FORMEDFROMLIGHT to receive 1 bonus month on any upgraded plan.
Related: Pixieset vs Pic-Time – Which is Better?
Of course, some photographers still like to provide their digital photos in a physical medium – so selling albums, prints, and USB flash drives is a great way to go. You can read more about our trusted print shops here, and if you need custom USB’s – WoodyWoodClick is our favorite!
6). Define Your Image Count in a Contract
The single most important thing when it comes to the number of images being provided is to set the expectation in writing.
Clients can often get confused, even upset, when this information isn’t known upfront. It’s an easy mistake to make – especially for a beginner. The easiest way to counteract this frustration is to simply dictate how much should be expected! Simple!!
In our photography contracts, we stipulate our clients can expect to receive 300-400 images for our 8 hour package.
We set the bar low, and often over deliver!
Some wedding photographers do this and then treat the extra images as an upsell.
The sky is the limit: but writing it down removes all concerns upfront.
If you’re a photographer who just wants to provide 50 stunning highlight images, you can do that and still retain happy clients by being transparent about this fact from the start.
The best way to send contracts for photography services is by using a customer relationship manager like Honeybook. It’s the one we use and get a lot of great benefits from. You can read more about this in our Honeybook review and self-made Honeybook FAQ where we answer common questions.
Conclusion
How many photos should a wedding photographer give their client? The short and simple answer is ~100 per hour of shooting or roughly 800 photos for 8 hour wedding day coverage.
As we explained, this figure is not some industry standard that all wedding photographers have to stick to. Different styles and approaches to photography will lend itself to a different volume of pictures at the end of the day.
Ultimately, if you are upfront with your clients about the number of photos they should expect and create great work, however many you decide to give in your wedding packages will absolutely work.
We hope this article lent some useful insight into this tough topic for new wedding photographers. For more helpful advice, check out our wedding photography pricing discussion for more relevant things to think about!