How to deliver wedding photos to clients

Deliver wedding photos through a private online gallery, in this order: back up the cards the same night, send a sneak peek within a week, cull and edit, build the gallery in sections, send one clear email with the link and the download PIN, and leave downloads and print ordering switched on. Then follow up once, because most couples do not download on the day the link arrives. USB drives, Dropbox links and email attachments still work, but a gallery is the only method that handles viewing, downloading, sharing with family and ordering prints in one place.

This guide covers the whole flow, step by step, with the timings most photographers use. Treat every number as a rule of thumb and adjust it to your own volume.

The flow at a glance

Step	When	What the couple receives
Backup	Wedding night	Nothing yet
Sneak peek	Within 7 days	5 to 15 finished photos
Cull and edit	Weeks 1 to 6	A short progress note at the halfway point
Gallery build	Last 2 days of the edit	Nothing
Delivery email	The promised date or earlier	Link, PIN, instructions
Follow-up	2 weeks after delivery	A reminder to download
Expiry or archive	6 to 12 months later	A warning, then the gallery closes

Step 1: back up before you sleep

Copy every card to 2 places before you go to bed on the wedding night: a working drive and a second drive or a cloud backup. Do not format the cards until the gallery is delivered. Nothing else in this guide matters if the files are lost, and a wedding cannot be reshot.

Step 2: send a sneak peek within the week

Pick 5 to 15 photos, edit them to your final standard, and send them within 7 days. Sooner is better; the morning after is best. The sneak peek does 3 jobs. It tells the couple the day was captured. It gives them something to post while the wedding is still being talked about. It buys you patience for the full edit. Send a small gallery link or a handful of files, not a preview of the whole set. Sneak peeks: when to send them and how many covers the choice of images.

Step 3: cull, then edit

Cull before you open an editor. A first pass at 1 to 2 seconds per frame removes blinks, misfires and duplicates. A second pass picks the strongest frame of each moment. Edit the keepers in one consistent style, and treat the final count as a quality decision rather than a volume one. A rule of thumb is 50 to 100 finished photos per hour of coverage; how many photos to deliver for a wedding explains why the lower half of that range often serves the couple better.

Export finished JPEGs at full resolution, sRGB, quality 90 or higher. Name the files in a sequence the couple can quote back to you, such as the couple’s surname plus a number. “The one of grandma laughing” is not a filename you can search for.

Step 4: build the gallery

Put the photos in sections in the order of the day: Getting Ready, Ceremony, Family, Portraits, Reception. 5 to 8 sections is plenty. Choose a cover photo the couple will recognize as theirs, not the most artistic frame of the day. Set privacy before you publish, not after: a password or email registration for viewing, a PIN for downloads, photos that do not belong in front of the guest list marked couple-only, and photos that must not be seen at all hidden.

Check 3 things on your phone before you send: the cover, the first row of each section, and that the download button works. Most couples open the link on a phone first.

In FOCL Galleries, sections show as tabs, the design tab has a live phone preview, and a photo marked Couple only is shown only to someone who enters one of the couple’s email addresses, which keeps it out of an ordinary guest’s view. That setting saves the awkward email a month later. For a frame no guest should ever reach, hide it instead.

Step 5: the delivery email

Send one email, to both partners, with 5 things in it: the link, the password or PIN, how to download (whole gallery, one section, or single photos), how to share with family, and how to order prints. Keep it short and put the link near the top. Gallery delivery email templates has wording to copy.

Send it on a weekday morning if you can. A link that arrives on Friday night gets opened, admired, and forgotten by Monday.

Step 6: downloads

Leave high-resolution downloads on from day one, unless your contract sells them separately. The couple paid for the photos; making them ask is friction that turns into support email. A download PIN keeps the full-resolution files with the couple while the viewing link goes to grandparents and friends, who can look and, if you allow it, take web-size copies.

Expect large downloads to take time. A full wedding ZIP at high resolution is often 5 to 15 GB, and on hotel wifi that fails. Tell the couple to download on a laptop at home, and to expect an emailed link when the ZIP is large. Then check the activity log 2 weeks later. If nobody has downloaded, send a reminder; how to get couples to download their gallery covers the follow-up.

Step 7: prints and albums

Mention prints in the delivery email and once more in the 2-week follow-up. Couples who order prints usually do it in the first month, while the gallery is new. If your gallery has a print store, set your markup before you send the link, not after the first order arrives.

Albums are a separate sale on a separate timeline. Ask the couple to favorite 60 to 100 photos in the gallery. That list is your album draft.

Step 8: after delivery

Decide before the wedding what happens to the gallery in a year: it stays up, it expires, or it is archived for a fee. Put that in the contract and repeat it in the delivery email. Whatever you choose, the couple should hear about it at delivery, not the week before it happens.

What to promise in the contract

3 lines are enough:

• Sneak peek within 7 days of the wedding.
• Full gallery within 8 weeks of the wedding. Write your real number plus 2 weeks of margin.
• Gallery online for 12 months from delivery. Download your photos in that time.

Deliver early against that promise and you look fast. Promise the fast date and miss it and you look slow, even when the edit took the same number of hours.