Congratulations! You’re getting married!
You and your fiancé will be gathering all your closest friends and family members together in one place for the day. Very few people at your ceremony and reception will know everyone else in the room, so using photos in your wedding can be a fun way to let your guests get to know one another. You can also snag photos of informal magical moments from the day that won’t necessarily be captured by your professional photographer.
Here are some ideas for incorporating photos into your ceremony and reception:
1. Include older photos to showcase your families’ histories.
Featuring photos of your parents or grandparents on their respective wedding days is a lovely and meaningful way to acknowledge your closest relatives and convey the importance of family in your relationship.
Everyone loves going down memory lane and seeing the fashions (and hairstyles) of older generations, so this can be really fun for your guests! You can showcase photos of your parents and grandparents on your reception entry table or cake table.
If you’d like to acknowledge loved ones who are no longer with you, you can also include their photos on your “Family History” table. I recommend choosing photos that help you recall a happy memory or moment with your relative.
2. Reveal special moments from your and your fiance’s childhoods.
You can showcase photos of you and your fiancé as children by making customized photo signs for your guest tables. Table nine can feature photos of you when you’re nine, table ten when you’re ten years old, and so on.
Check out this example on Pinterest for further inspiration!
3. Share images of your courtship and partnership when you’re communicating the logistics of your big day.
Wedding websites are a popular and practical way to share the details and logistics of your big day, and “Save the Date” cards are a great way to give your guests a heads-up about the wedding date (so they can reserve the time in their calendars in advance).
You can personalize both your wedding website and your “Save Date” cards by including photos your relationship with your fiancé.
Consider including photos of how you met, your first date, your favorite places to go, and things you like to do together. You can also include your formal (or informal) engagement photos, too!
Your proposal could even be part of the engagement photo shoot! Some couples stage a proposal with a photographer ready to capture the big moment. If you’ve got those photos, you can include them in your website or “Save the Date” cards, too.
4. Create a personalized guest book using photos of your friends and family.
You can create a beautiful and memorable guest book that includes photos of your guests! For more information on creating a photo guest book, check our upcoming post, “3 Steps to Creating a Meaningful Guestbook,” (which will be published soon, or get inspiration from our Picture This Organized Pinterest boards, specifically our “Wedding Guestbook” board.
5. Create an entertaining way for your guests to snap one-of-a-kind photos at the reception.
You can capture fun and memorable pictures of your guests by setting up a designated photo area or a photo booth at your reception.
I recently attended a wedding reception where they set up a camera in a little “photo area,” where guests could have fun taking impromptu pictures of one another. You can supply a regular camera at the photo station, or use a Polaroid camera (so your guests can watch as the photos develop instantly). Here’s an affordable little Polaroid you can buy for this purpose.
You can provide a giant frame with your name and your fiancé’s name written on it, to use as a backdrop – your guests can pose inside the frame and snap photos of each other. Or you can try one of these backdrop ideas.
Supplying fun props like party hats, feather boas, and giant sunglasses will inspire your guests to get creative with their photos, too! Take a look at this fun example from Pinterest.
You could rent a photo booth to accomplish the same thing — rental costs are usually between $350 and $900. When your friends and family take pictures in the photo booth, two photo strips are printed right after the picture is taken: one for the you (the bride and groom) and the other as a memento for the guests.
To find a photo booth rental company near you, check out the Photo Booth Rental Directory which includes questions you should ask before you rent from a booth company.
6. Share photos your guests take during the ceremony and reception.
These days, everyone has a camera at their fingertips, and many of your guests will be snapping photos during your special day.
It’s such fun to see photos of your magical day right away (without having to wait weeks or months to get pictures back from your professional photographer) and your friends and family will love sharing their informal pictures with you.
Here are a few tips for sharing photos of your ceremony and reception:
- Social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram are the quickest ways for guests to share photos. However, there are limitations for getting photos from these social sharing sites. Facebook typically compresses the heck out of photos, so if you try to download the pictures, the image quality will be very low. Instagram doesn’t allow you to save someone else’s photo directly from the app, so all you can do is view the photos from your guests’ Instagram profiles.
- The best way for your guests to share photos with you (and the rest of the group) is by setting up an online group album that all your photo-taking friends can upload to. I recommend using Flickr or iCloud to do this. With Flickr, you can set up a wedding album and give your guests the log in code. Using iCloud, you can set up a Shared Album for folks to share photos with you. With both of these options, the photos will be high quality, so you can download the images and add them to your albums or frames later on.
- If you want to share your professional photos, always, ALWAYS make sure you have permission from your photographer to do so. Most photographers will have a clause in their agreements that addresses this topic. Even when you have your professional photographer’s permission, be sure to give them a photo credit by adding a caption or other acknowledgement next to the photo. If you’ve paid your photographer to capture your big day, it’s a wonderful gesture to thank them by sharing their amazing work with your social media community — just make sure you ask before you share (or address this ahead of time, in your contract).
Photos Can Add Richness, Laughter and Light to Your Big Day
Your wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of all the most important people in your lives, and adding photos to your day is a wonderful way to honor your ancestors, personalize your event, and gather memories that you and your new spouse will treasure for many years to come.
Hopefully this post has given you some ideas for including photos in your big day. If you incorporated photos in your wedding in a unique way in your wedding (or if you’re planning on using some special photo-related ideas in your upcoming wedding) tell us about it in the comments below.