What Causes Delays in the Delivery of Wedding Albums?

Did you know that a couple in Ohio whose wedding album was delayed by almost 2 years ended up filing a lawsuit against their photographer? After having received a payment of about $3,500 dollars for the wedding album, the photographer cited “lack of proper communication” as the reason for this huge delay.

While delays of this scale are uncommon, there is no denying that there are a number of factors that do add to a reasonable delay in getting a wedding photography album ready.

Photography isn’t an easy job. People tend to think that a photographer’s job ends with just showing up to an event and clicking a bunch of pictures. Clicking pictures is obviously the highlight and some may even say that it is the easiest part of the job. But what about the slew of tasks that takes place after the main event is over?

We know that the entire album-making process can be quite daunting as there are so many steps involved, so much back and forth between the clients and often a lot of misunderstandings and errors. All of this could cost you from providing your client with a positive experience.

We tried to understand the workflow of a regular photographer to figure out how they go about creating an album. For most photographers, the process is the same.

1. The photographer clicks more than 10,000 photographs at an event.

2. Next comes the process of culling wherein the best images out of the photo session is selected and unnecessary ones are discarded. Blurry or repeated photos are often “culled out” in this phase

2. They send this massive amount of photographs to the client either via uploading on Google Drive or Wetransfer (which could take over a day if you have a poor internet connection) or an external hard disk (which includes the additional hassle of purchasing and delivering it to the client).

3. The photographer asks the client to select their favourite photos from the lot which then need to be segregated and sent back to the photographer.

The main issue with this kind of workflow is the long periods of waiting between each of these steps.

The selection process is usually done in three ways: Deleting, picking and writing.

Deleting method is when the client simply deletes all of the photos they do not want in their wedding album and the final group of photos left will be used by us to design your wedding album. Retrieving a deleted photo in case they change their mind could be a pain.

Picking method involves manually moving only the required photographs from one folder into another separate folder.

Writing generally means that the client goes through each and every one of the photos and then jots down the filenames on an excel sheet or paper. Going back and forth between multiple tabs might be disorienting and quite frustrating.

Another main issue is that in either one of these methods, the massive amount of photographs sent by the photographer needs to be downloaded onto the client’s system. Now downloading over 10,000 photos, each of which may have a file size of over 20MB requires a lot of space and time. It could wreak havoc on your system if it isn’t built to handle files of such huge sizes.

The longer the client takes to respond, the more your work gets delayed. It is pretty natural that the client would be busy post the wedding celebrations with a billion other things. Finding the time to sit down with a laptop to sort through these many images might be time-consuming and not at the top of their priorities.

Selecting photographs is usually a collaborative effort by the family. Again, getting the entire family together long enough to go through each and every photo is difficult.

There may have been various significant guests who attended the wedding. Spotting and ensuring that photographs of those particular guests get selected could be another laborious task that eats up a lot of time.

At the same time, it is important that the photographer is efficient and is able to provide the client with a great experience, lest they are inclined to form a negative image of your services.

The good news is that there are some amazing intuitive tools available that can help streamline your entire wedding album process.

Premagic’s photo selection smoothens the task by means of digital selection of the photographs. Clients can easily select their required photographs without having to download, upload heavy files or jot down a long list of filenames.

Photographers can just drag and drop the event pictures into the Premagic app to build a custom gallery created under the client's name. Since the photos are optimized to support faster uploads, this part should be over in seconds.

A secure link to this online gallery can instantly then be forwarded to your clients via mail or WhatsApp. Multiple links can be sent to spouses and other family members involved in the selection process.

Your clients can easily select their favourite images directly within the photo gallery by simply swiping and tapping on the required ones. The selected photographs will be forwarded back to you with the click of a button, for final editing and album design.

The entire process can be completed in less than a couple of hours!

With Premagic, you form a clear and easy path of communication with your client, while doing away with unnecessary back and forth phone calls and messages. Our aim is to simplify your workflow, giving you more time out in the field to grow your business rather than endless hours behind a screen.

Try Premagic today and open up a world of opportunities!