How To Pick Your Wedding Photos For Your Album - HARD Mode

Picking your Wedding Photos on HARD mode? Eh?!

First things first, you’re probably thinking, ‘Why on Earth would anyone want to choose “HARD” mode for selecting their wedding photos for their Album?!’ and to be honest, you’re probably right.

However, there are two things to consider here:

1) Some people enjoy playing the game on hard mode - Yes, to some it sounds a little odd, but there’s something about a “challenge” that excites people.

2) More importantly, people don’t realise what hard mode is, because they missed the “EASY” option. An easy thing to overlook, especially if you’ve never done this before.

With that said, there will absolutely be an EASY mode that will be covered at a later date, but I wanted to start on HARD for several reasons.

Background:

One of the biggest pain points of my couples is when it comes to selecting their photos for the Album. Over the past 12 months, I’ve learnt little tips along the way through experience and feedback. Which bring me perfectly right around to the reason behind this guide.

It all started with Lisa and Jake. When it comes to organising and (dare I say it, a little OCD), Lisa is the Queen! So when I sat down with them both and asked how they got on picking their favourites, whilst part of me wasn’t surprised by Lisa’s approach, I was a little shocked.

Shocked because whilst it seemed very much like she opted for HARD mode in choosing her photos for her Album, it was genius at the same time.

See Lisa played the game on HARD because ultimately, there was a little more motive than just picking those for her Album.

The Method:

First, download all your photos from your online gallery on to your computer/laptop. This ideally shouldn’t be done on a mobile phone or a tablet, but I would always encourage everyone to download them all anyway as a backup. So whilst you’re at it, make several copies on either several computers/laptops or USB sticks. If you don’t own ”several computers” (Yes, I get it, why would you?!) consider asking family and friends to do so for you. *see footnote for more

Once you have all your photos in one folder, (this is where HARD mode kicks in) go ahead and create a separate folder named after each guest. You don’t have to do EVERY guest, you could even just do the ‘key players’ - Think really close family and friends.

Then what you want to do is go through each photo and COPY (make sure you copy and not move) it into each guest named folder if they’re in the photo. Some might be easy as it could just be a photo of them, others might be part of a group photo. (Now do you understand the reason for copying and not moving).

Yes, I realise this is going to be time consuming, this is why it’s called “HARD” mode.

Once you’ve done that you can now go through each folder picking your favourite photos and that way you know you have everyone covered.

But the real genius part is that, you now can go and get individual gift prints done for people for birthdays/christmas/anniversaries/thank you cards. The possibilities are endless. You now (dare I say it) even have ‘go to’ photos when you want to post on Social Media.

It’s actually a really genius way of doing things.

So there you have it, picking your wedding album photos on HARD mode.

The trade is simply TIME and a lot of it.

If that sounds like too much work and you’d really rather just play the game on EASY mode, stay tuned, that’s coming up soon.

In Summary:

To summarise, there are a couple of pro’s and con’s to HARD mode, whilst it achieves the end goal (and a couple of bonuses) it also is time consuming.

Footnote: Other possible backup solutions are to stick them in the “cloud” any cloud service provider should be sufficient but read the terms and conditions. (Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Onedrive, Amazon Prime). Cloud is a great solution, with most allowing you access anywhere from any device, but just don’t rely on it solely… please.