How to choose photographs for your wedding album in less than 3 hours

Have you received the wedding photographs from your photographer, either online, or on a USB stick? Do you now have the big task ahead to provide a list of images for your wedding album? Are you a little bit afraid of the huge number of images and how you are going to whittle them down? Then this is for you!

Most photographers have a certain number of images they include in an album package, such as 40, 60, 80 etc. Please bear in mind, that contemporary wedding albums can contain almost any number of photographs, such as 56, or 156, or as many as 200. Unless they are old-fashioned albums, they can be easily extended to include more images (at a cost, of course).

Most couples see selecting their wedding photographs as a daunting task and procrastinate over it for weeks, even months, as there can be a huge number of images to choose from. I am going to give you a little secret on how to select your wedding photographs for your wedding album within 3 hours - from start to finish.

• Do this on a computer or laptop (not iPad or tablet computer).
• Create a folder on your computer and call it WEDDING PHOTOS.
• Within that folder, create 2 more folders. The first one called NO1, the second one called NO2.
• Copy all your wedding photographs into the main folder (the WEDDING PHOTOS one).
• View the images with the normal PC viewer or Mac Preview.
• Now here's how to do it:
• Important to remember before we start: Only think ALBUM. Try not to think who "has to be" in the album, but what images you want to be in your wedding album.

• Round 1: Select the photographs you do NOT want in the album, by simply moving them into the folder called NO1. After round 1, you should have at least halved the images in the main folder.
• Round 2:  Go through the images that are still in the main folder and look at them as a group of images. Sometimes, I give the couple 2-3 different ring shots. Maybe the bride likes one photo and the groom another. Look at the two of them and agree which one goes in the album. Remove the other one into NO2. So the NO2 folder contains the ones that almost made it into the album. Go through the photos and check for photos that are similar. For example - do you need 4 images of the bride’s dress getting buttoned up? Or is maybe one enough? (just an example here…!)
• Repeat this process until you are 100% happy with the selection of images.
• Once you are happy with the photos in the main folder, put the numbers ordered in an excel spreadsheet or type them - one number per line - into an email (or word document) and send it to your photographer.

Here's an example wedding album with 96 images (50 pages, i.e. 25 spreads)

‍