Your wedding day went by in a flash, didn’t it? When I was a bride, everyone told me that it would, but I didn’t grasp the full meaning of that until it happened to me. All I had left were the photos and video, and I realized these items would increase in value over time, so I’ve done my best to preserve them. Our wedding images and video are priceless to us, even more now that we have a daughter to pass them on to some day.

Your images are priceless, too, so please make it a priority to protect them so that you have them for years to come. Below are my tips on how you can preserve your images and keep them safe.

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Download your wedding images

Once you receive your full gallery, the first thing you’ll want to do is download all your images. The gallery will prompt you to choose between high-resolution files and web-sized files. I recommend downloading both, and marking them carefully so that you know which ones are which. You’ll want to use the high-resolution files to make prints and web-sized files to upload to social media.

Save your images on an external hard drive (or two!)

Next, copy your images onto one or two external hard drives. The more places your images are located, the less likely you are to lose them if one of your external drives or even computer were to fail. I recommend putting your images on two external hard-drives (like this one) so that you can keep one at home and one off-site, at your parents’ or in-laws’ home. An alternative to having them off-site would be to keep them in a fireproof safe.

A quick note about your wedding video! If you have a wedding video, you’ll want to do your best to preserve that, too, so get external hard drives that are big enough to hold the video files so that you can keep both photos and video all in the same place.

Get your images on the cloud

Another place you can back up your images is in the cloud. There are so many inexpensive options for this, including iCloud, Backblaze, Dropbox, and Amazon Drive.

Invest in a Wedding Album

Now that your digital files are safe, it’s time to print your photos! It’s so essential to have an heirloom of your wedding day! Your wedding album will be passed on to future generations and it is the best way to document the beginning of your family’s legacy. If your wedding collection included a wedding album, I’m already working on the pre-design to get you started. You’ll receive that within the week following the delivery of your online gallery. If you did not include an album in your wedding collection when you booked, then click here to inquire about ordering an album now.

Make Parent Albums

One of the best ways to say “thank you” to your parents for their love and support during your wedding planning (and more) is through a parent album. Your wedding day is such an important day for you and your spouse, but it’s just as important to your parents! As a parent myself now, nothing would make me happier after my daughter’s wedding than to have an album of her wedding day to re-live again and again, and I’m sure any parent would feel the same way. After all, I think you can agree that parents don’t want to sit in front of a computer looking at an online gallery. Parents, more than anyone, value tangible albums that you can touch and feel, and I don’t blame them! Looking through our wedding album is always so special to me.

Print Your Images

There’s something magical about reminiscing about your wedding day while looking through a set of professional prints. It’s also important to remember that technology advances so fast (remember floppy disks?) so it’s important to have tangible versions of your images. Photographs are not meant to just live on your computer – they are meant to be printed. Find time to print your favorite images from the day and keep them in a print box. You’ll be happy you did! You can print your images right from your online gallery.

Get your photos on your walls

Get your images on your walls so that you can be reminded of your wedding day on a daily basis. Please get in touch to order canvases of your favorite images.

I can’t wait to see what you do with your wedding images! Please don’t forget to share photos and videos of your printed images and tag me on social when you show them off to friends and family!