How to deliver wedding photos to a client

The editing is done. There are eight hundred finished frames on your drive, a couple who have been waiting six weeks, and a decision you have probably never made deliberately: how to actually hand the photographs over.

Most photographers arrive at their delivery method by accident — whatever was to hand for the first wedding becomes the process for the next fifty. This is what a considered version looks like.

Decide what the deliverable actually is

Before choosing a tool, be clear about what the couple is receiving, because it is usually three different things bundled into one word:

• The full set of finished images — every frame you edited, at full resolution. This is the deliverable.
• A smaller set for sharing — resized, sRGB, for Instagram and WhatsApp. Optional, and appreciated far more than it costs you.
• A way to look through them — a browsable gallery. Not the same thing as the files, and conflating the two is the most common source of disappointment.

A couple given a folder of 40 MB TIFFs has the deliverable and no way to look at it. A couple given a gallery of 1600px previews has a way to look and not the deliverable. They need both, and they should not have to ask.

Resolution: send the originals

The temptation to resize down before delivery is real — the files are smaller, the upload is faster, and the couple will probably never print anything larger than A4. Resist it anyway, for two reasons.

The first is that you cannot predict what they will want in ten years. A parent dies and they want a print for the wall. A magazine asks for the ceremony shot. Neither is possible from a 2048px JPEG, and by then your archive may be a dead drive in a drawer.

The second is positioning. Metered delivery — compressed files, an upsell to originals, a link that expires — reads as withholding. Handing over everything at full size costs you nothing you keep and is the single clearest signal that the job is finished.

Structure it so it can be navigated

Eight hundred files in one flat list is technically complete and practically unusable. Divide it the way the day actually happened, because that is how the couple will look for things:

1. Preparation — both parties, morning
2. Ceremony
3. Portraits — couple, then family groups
4. Reception — speeches, first dance, party

Four galleries or four clearly named sections is enough. Deeper structure than that becomes a filing system nobody asked for.

Name the files properly

Filenames are the part of a delivery that outlives the delivery. In five years the gallery link may be dead and the folder on their laptop will still be there, so what it is called matters.

A sortable, self-describing pattern beats camera defaults. Something like 2026-07-18_hana-omar_ceremony_042.jpg sorts chronologically, survives being mixed with photographs from another source, and tells anyone who finds it in a decade what it is. DSC_4471.jpg does none of that and collides with every other camera on earth.

More on this in export settings for client delivery, which covers the colour space and sizing decisions alongside naming.

Control who sees what

A wedding gallery is not one audience. The couple should see everything. The bride's aunt who wants the four photographs she is in should not have to scroll past eight hundred to find them, and probably should not see the getting-ready set at all.

This is what per-group links are for: one gallery, several doors into it, each with its own password and its own subset of the photographs. It saves you exporting a separate folder per family and saves them a scroll. There is more on the privacy side of this in passwords, guest links and who sees which photos.

Say what happens next

Whatever you use, the handover message should answer four questions before they are asked. Most delivery complaints are actually missing-information complaints.

1. How do I download these, and do I need an account? (Almost always: no account.)
2. Are these the full-size files, or previews?
3. How long will this link work?
4. Can I share it with my family, or should I ask you for a separate link?

Four sentences. It prevents most of the follow-up email you would otherwise answer one message at a time.

Tell them to make their own copy

This is the sentence photographers leave out and later regret. A gallery — anyone's gallery, including ours — is a delivery mechanism, not the couple's archive. Tell them, in writing, to download everything to their own computer and copy it somewhere second.

It protects them from a service they do not control, and it protects you from being the only remaining copy of their wedding three years after you delivered it.

A checklist

1. Export finished JPEGs at full resolution, sRGB, with descriptive filenames.
2. Also export a small web-sized set — it takes one preset and gets used constantly.
3. Upload and split into sections that match the day.
4. Set a password if the gallery is not meant to be public.
5. Create per-family links where you know a group only wants its own photographs.
6. Check it yourself on a phone, on cellular, before sending. This catches more problems than any other single step.
7. Send the link with the four answers above, and the instruction to keep their own copy.