Your photographer just delivered your full wedding gallery! What an amazing day! You and your new spouse spend some quality time together going through all the photos, picking your favorites, and dreaming about all the things you can do with your photos.

Maybe you share a few on social media, maybe you change your profile picture to your favorite newlywed portrait.

And then you move on with your day to day life. You open up the gallery one day, think about designing an album, talk about it over dinner, then promptly forget about it again.

And that’s ok! There are so many things to do with your photos that it can be overwhelming, and sometimes that leads to decision paralysis. Soon enough, it’s your one year anniversary and you’ve done nothing with the photos.

You’ve spent thousands of dollars on the experience of getting those final photos, and they deserve to be loved and shared. You deserve to relive your wedding day in every way you can.

Here are the top things you can do with your wedding photos in order!

1. Use your engagement photos as decorations at your wedding

Ok I’m cheating a bit with these first two because they actually are about your engagement photos, but you’ll thank me later for the ideas.

I absolutely suggest using your engagement portraits to help decorate your wedding venue! I’ve seen some incredible displays that kept guests coming back again and again. You can print canvases or large frames if you want to go big, or you can create small prints and mix them in with your photos together throughout the years. You can even create books for your guests to flip through.

The best part is that you can take all of these home with you and use them to decorate your space together. You can give a few as gifts too! Parents would love printed work of you two together.

Here are a few photos for inspiration!

2. Engagement photos for guest book at your wedding

One of the best things I’ve seen is one of my couples using their engagement portraits to create a guest book for their guests to sign while at their wedding. Half the pages were printed with photos and the other half were blank so people could write notes. It was a hardback book that they can keep and look back on for the rest of their lives.

3. Save all your photos and back them up in multiple places

The very first thing you should do with your wedding photos is download them and put them in multiple safe spaces. Put them on a flash drive, an external hard drive, and on the cloud. Keep them safe.

Should your photographer lose the photos, the gallery expire, or the entire internet shut down, you’ll be thankful that you still have access to them.

4. Share your favorites to social media

Right after your wedding, the quickest way to share photos is to post them on social media. Here are a few ideas:

• Post a gallery on Facebook
• Post to your feed or stories on Instagram
• Change your profile pictures

Make sure you tag all your vendors because we LOVE seeing the photos and sharing in your joy 🙂

5. Add them to your website

If you run your own business, are in the wedding vendor world, or just have your own website, you can add your wedding photos to your about page so people can see more into your life. This is especially applicable to those in the wedding industry because it will show your clients that you’ve been through the process of wedding planning and you can help them.

6. Use your wedding photos to send thank you cards

Use Vistaprint, Shutterfly, or whatever card printing service you use to print your wedding photos as thank you cards. Send them to all your guests to thank them for coming and to thank them for any gifts they gave you. It’s a great way to show your guests that you appreciate them and that they helped make this wedding day possible.

Pro tip: also send these thank you cards to your wedding vendors. It is literally the nicest thing in the world when we get a card in the mail from our clients with a handwritten note, so be sure to print a few extra and send them our way!

7. It’s time to decorate your house!

The sky is the limit here. You can print large canvases, big hanging framed prints, small framed prints to place on desks and tables, and so much more. These also make great gifts for parents.

8. Create an heirloom you’ll love forever: your wedding album

Wedding albums are one of the greatest things you can do with your photos. If you create a high quality album, it will last years and will become a family heirloom. You can put it out on your coffee table for guests to look through. You can create a tradition with your spouse where you go through the album every year on your anniversary. The higher quality the album, the more likely you will want to share it and look through it countless times yourself.

To my clients: ask about albums and I’ll help you make a beautiful heirloom that will last for years!

9. Surprise your parents with a parent album

How to make your parents cry: give them an album of their own. There are several approaches you can take here:

1. You can create a duplicate copy of your own album (although this is way more expensive)
2. You can create an album that’s smaller in size and maybe has less pages
3. Alternatively you can create a photo book that’s thinner (see below)
4. You can engrave or emboss a personal message thanking them for being part of your day

Parents will adore it and share it with all their friends.

10. Go crazy with Etsy

You can do literally anything with your wedding photos on Etsy. Scroll through all the personalized projects and pick whatever sticks out at you. You can do them for yourself, for your house, or for gifts for years.

A few of my favorite examples:

• Turn your photos into digital art: example 1, example 2, example 3
• Wood engraved first dance song portrait
• Wood wall art
• This cute film roll keychain
• Print boxes: leather, wood, or linen

Go find some cute things while supporting small businesses!

Bonus: Inspire other couples by submitting to blogs

Your wedding photographer or planner might do this, but you can submit your photos to wedding blogs or magazines to inspire other couples. There are hundreds out there, so search around for what blogs most fit the style of your wedding and your goals as a couple.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Appalachian Mountain Bride
• Wandering Weddings
• A Northwoods Wedding
• Dancing With Her
• Junebug Weddings
• The White Wren
• Boho Weddings
• Bridal Musings
• 100 Layer Cake
• Elegant Wedding
• Intimate Weddings
• Southern Bride
• Utterly Engaged
• Whimsically Wed
• Style Me Pretty

I hope you’re inspired, excited, and ready to love the heck out of your wedding photos. Comment below what else you’ve done or would love to do with your photos to give inspiration to other couples!

If you liked this blog post, check out these:

How to Pick Your Wedding Vendors

How to Create Your Perfect Wedding Timeline

Tips for Planning Wedding Family Photos

Interested in me photographing your wedding? Contact me!

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