Wedding photo delivery checklist

The gallery sent at 11 PM is the one with the wrong password, a sideways photo in Ceremony, and a cover cropped through the couple’s faces on a phone. This checklist is 45 minutes of checking, done the night before you send, not the morning of.

Work it top to bottom. Each block is a place a gallery goes wrong.

The checklist

Cull

• Every duplicate, blink, and misfire is gone. If 2 photos are nearly the same, one goes.
• Every person the couple named as important appears at least once, in focus.
• Every item on the must-have list is in the set, or you have a sentence for the couple explaining why not.
• Family photos: one keeper per grouping, and the count matches the list.
• Nothing the couple would not want guests to see: mid-chew, mid-blink, a guest’s wardrobe problem.
• Final count is inside the range your contract promised.

Edit

• White balance is consistent within each block of the day.
• Skin tones match across cameras and across both shooters.
• Horizons straight, crops clean, no sensor dust in the sky.
• Black-and-white only where it earns it, never as a fix for bad color.
• Spot-checked 20 photos at 100 percent for focus and noise.

Export

• Full-resolution JPEGs, sRGB, quality 90 or above, long edge untouched.
• No watermark on the files the couple downloads, unless the contract says otherwise.
• Filenames sort in day order with one prefix: couple-date-0001.
• Capture time correct on both shooters’ files so the gallery sorts by time.
• Your copyright in the IPTC field; GPS stripped if it was on.

Gallery build

• Sections in day order: Getting Ready, Ceremony, Family, Portraits, Reception.
• Details folded into the section where they happened, not a section of their own.
• Cover photo chosen: the couple, both faces, survives a vertical crop. Focal point set on the faces.
• Gallery title is the couple’s names, spelled the way they spelled them.
• Date correct.
• Sort by capture time inside each section, then hand-fixed where the 2 cameras disagree.

Privacy

• Password set and written down for the email.
• Photos the couple asked to keep private are hidden or couple-only.
• Anyone who asked not to be photographed is not in the gallery.
• Expiry date set if you use one, and it matches the contract.
• Search engines cannot index the gallery.

Downloads

• Downloads allowed for the couple.
• Guest downloads on or off, per the couple’s answer.
• Download PIN set and written down for the email.
• Full-gallery ZIP tested: it built, it opened, files are full size.
• Single-photo download tested at both sizes.

Favorites

• Favorites switched on so the couple can mark album picks.
• You know where to see their picks later.

Test on a phone

• Link opened on your phone, logged out, as a guest would.
• Password works. Cover looks right on a vertical screen. Sections show as tabs.
• Scrolled 3 sections: photos load, nothing sideways, nothing cropped badly.
• One photo downloaded to the phone.
• Same checks on a computer.

Send

• Delivery email written with link, password, PIN, section names, download steps, and expiry date copied from the gallery.
• Sent to the email the couple named for the gallery, other partner copied.
• Calendar reminder set for the expiry email.
• Vendor share links sent to the planner and florist if they asked.
• Second shooter’s portfolio selects sent.

Cull and edit: the checks nobody does twice

The cull is finished when every person the couple named appears in focus at least once, every must-have is either in the set or explained, and the family groupings match the list. Those are 3 checks against 3 documents, and they take 15 minutes with the documents open. The culling workflow covers how to get there; this is only the last pass.

For the edit, the fastest check is the one most people skip: view the whole set as small thumbnails and look for the frames that jump out. A warm frame in a cool block, a dark one in a bright block. Fix those and the set reads as one wedding.

Export

Export at full resolution unless your contract says otherwise. Delivering 2048px files to save upload time is a decision the couple discovers the first time they order a 16x20. If the gallery offers a web-size download as well, that covers phones; the full-size file covers prints.

Set capture time correctly on the second shooter’s files before export. If the clocks were 1 hour apart, their ceremony sorts into your cocktail hour, and dragging 640 photos back into order by hand is a bad evening.

Sections and cover

Five sections in day order is the standard. Details go into the section where they happened. A separate Details tab first means the couple opens their wedding to a photo of shoes.

The cover is the couple, both faces, in a frame that survives a vertical crop, because a phone shows a vertical crop. Set the focal point on the faces, then check it on the phone preview before you trust it.

Privacy and downloads

Set the password before you write the email, so the email has the right one. Hide, or mark as couple-only, anything from the do-not-photograph list. Set the expiry date if you use one, and make it match the contract.

Then test the download you are about to tell the couple to do. Build the full ZIP, open it, check that one file is full size. If your platform emails large ZIPs as a link, wait for the email and click it. A download that fails on the couple’s first try does not get a second try for 6 months.

The phone test

Open the link on your phone, logged out, as a guest would. Enter the password. Look at the cover on a vertical screen. Scroll 3 sections. Download one photo. Then do the same on a computer.

Do this every time, not only when you change the design, because it is the one check that sees what the couple sees. Assume they open it first on a phone, in a car, to show someone.

Send

Write the delivery email last, from the email templates, with the password, the PIN, the section names, and the expiry date copied from the gallery, not from memory. Set the reminder for the expiry email in the same minute. Then send the vendor share links and the second shooter’s portfolio selects, because the day the gallery goes out is the only day you will remember to.

The unlesses

• If you deliver in 2 rounds, portraits first and everything else later, run privacy, downloads, and the phone test on round 1 as well. Round 1 is the one that gets shared.
• If the couple asked for no guest downloads, the ZIP test is still the couple’s test. Log in as them, not as a guest.
• If you do not use expiry dates, delete those lines, and delete the reminder line too.

The whole process from cull to email is in how to deliver wedding photos to clients. How many photos to land on is in how many photos to deliver.