This is it! The moment you’ve been waiting for - your photos are ready! I’m always so excited to share the final photos, but I also want to make sure that you know what to do with them now that the files are in your hands.

You’ve invested in high quality photography, so make sure you protect your investment and take care of your images. Here are three things that you should do when you get your images:

Download them (and back them up)

Once you’ve gotten a chance to look at your photos, you should protect them. In this digital world, having your wedding photos saved in multiple places is ESSENTIAL. I keep your photos in an online gallery for at least a year, but you should save them online, download them to a hard drive, and keep a set in at least one other place to make sure you keep them safe.

For my clients, the Pixieset link you receive when you get your photos now allows you to download them straight to Google Drive, so it’s easy to put a copy of your photos in the cloud.

Share them!

Now for some fun - sharing your photos with family and friends! There are lots of ways to do this, but most of us will be posting pictures to social media. To make sure your photos look their best online, be sure to download the “Web Size” versions to share. This makes a difference, as many social media platforms compress or resize images, making them appear grainy or distorted. I’d also encourage you not to use a filter on your photos. Your photographer works hard to edit your photos and put a lot of time into getting things just right!

For my clients, Pixieset makes this easy, with a quick select option to download the whole gallery as web-ready images right from the gallery.

I love seeing your photos out in the world, so please tag me on Instagram (@megangrahamphoto) and on Facebook (@megangrahamphotography) when you post them!

Print Them!

It’s true. Your photos deserve a life beyond social media feeds. Printing your photos is a timeless way of keeping these memories a permanent part of your daily life. There is nothing like having something tangible to hold in your hands, hang on your walls, share with your loved ones - anything really!

I recommend getting your photos printed online from a professional service - there are lots of them out there and all of them are better than the machine at your local pharmacy.

For my clients, you can actually print your photos directly from the Pixieset gallery I send you. I print all of my own photos through Pixieset, and have been blown away by the quality. There might also be a little discount code in there for you to use on prints - just a nudge from me saying that printed photos are totally worth it :)

If you’re one of my wedding clients looking for heirloom-quality physical copies of your wedding photos, let’s create a Wedding Album together! Now that your photos are ready, I’m happy to work with you to pick your favorites, organize them to match the flow of your wedding day, and deliver a photo album you will treasure for the rest of your lives together. My husband and I look through our album on our anniversary, and often pull it out anytime we feel like reminding ourselves of how our life together started.

Bonus Tip: Let your photographer know!

Sending out a gallery can be nerve-wracking! As photographers, we’ve poured our hearts and souls into creating images that tell your story. So when we deliver your photos, let them know you got them!

My happiest moments as a photographer have been the calls, texts, and emails from clients telling me how much they love their photos. Those messages mean so much to me - it’s why I do what I do!

So tell your photographer that you got your photos. You can be honest too, if there’s something that we can do to grow or improve. That feedback helps us hone our craft, and helps us improve for future clients.