How to Deliver Wedding Photos to Clients: A 2026 Guide

Delivery is the last thing you do for a couple and the first thing their friends see of your work. Most photographers treat it as an administrative step, which is understandable and expensive: the gallery is the piece of your portfolio that the largest number of strangers will ever open.

Here is what matters, in the order it comes up.

How long should delivery take?

Four to eight weeks for a full wedding is the range most couples are quoted and most photographers hit. Six is a safe promise in peak season.

The number matters less than two other things.

Say the number before the wedding, in writing, in the contract. Nearly every delivery complaint is really a complaint about not knowing.

Send something within 48 hours. Ten to twenty frames while the couple is still on a high does more for referrals than shaving a week off the full gallery. They are posting about their wedding that week whether you give them something or not. Give them something.

How many photos should you send?

For a full day, 400 to 800 finished frames is normal. Eight hours of coverage lands around 500 for most photographers.

Resist sending everything. A couple who opens 1,200 photographs does not feel well served, they feel handed homework, and the frames you are proudest of get buried in near-duplicates of the same handshake. Culling is part of the work you were hired for.

There is more detail in how many photos a wedding photographer should deliver.

What resolution, and how many versions?

Two, labelled in plain words.

Full resolution for printing and archiving. These are the files the couple should keep somewhere safe.

Web resolution for posting and sharing. A long edge around 2,000 pixels is plenty for any screen, and it stops a 40MB original being compressed into mush by a messaging app.

Offer both, describe them as "for printing" and "for sharing" rather than in pixel dimensions, and make the web set the easier one to grab. Most couples want to post, not print.

Do not deliver over Google Drive or WeTransfer

Tempting because it is free, and the most common way a good wedding gets a mediocre handover.

WeTransfer expires, usually within a week. Couples come back to a dead link in month three and you get the email.

Drive folders are unbrowsable. A grid of IMG_4471.jpg in a system font is not a presentation of your work, and on a phone it is close to unusable.

Neither is shareable. The couple cannot pass their gallery to an aunt without handing over a folder she can edit or a link that dies.

Neither carries your name. Everyone who opens that folder sees Google's interface, not yours. If your next booking comes from a guest at the last wedding, that is the whole problem in one sentence.

Use something built for the job. That is not only a pitch for us: Pixieset, Pic-Time and ShootProof all solve it, and we compare them honestly, including where they beat us.

Make it work on a phone

Most people who open a wedding gallery are on a phone, on worse wifi than yours, standing somewhere. If it takes eight seconds to show anything they close it, and that was your work they were about to look at.

Two things cause almost all of it. Photos served as JPEG when AVIF or WebP would carry the same picture in a third of the bytes, and one size served to every device, so a phone downloads the file a laptop needed.

Both are decisions your gallery company made for you, and neither is visible until somebody measures it. Check your own with our free gallery speed test: paste the link you send to clients and see what it costs a couple to open.

Set it up to be shared

The couple is not your only audience. Assume forty people open the link.

• Do not password protect it by default. A password is right for a boudoir shoot and wrong for most weddings, where it becomes a wall between your work and every guest who might hire you. Use one when the couple asks.
• Turn downloads on. Making people ask for photographs of themselves is a strange hill to choose.
• Put your studio name and your fonts on it. Every share is a portfolio view.

Tell them what happens next

The delivery email does more work than most photographers give it credit for. Keep it short and answer three things: here is your gallery, here is how to download, here is what I need from you.

That last one is where album selections belong. If you need sixty photographs chosen for a book, ask in the same message, give a real date, and use a selection list with a deadline instead of an email thread. The album that ships in six weeks and the album that ships in eight months differ almost entirely at this step.

The checklist

1. Delivery date in the contract, agreed before the wedding.
2. Sneak peek within 48 hours.
3. Full gallery in four to eight weeks, culled rather than dumped.
4. Two resolutions, labelled for printing and for sharing.
5. A real gallery, not a Drive folder or an expiring link.
6. Fast on a phone. Check it rather than assume it.
7. Downloads on, password off unless asked for.
8. One email: gallery, downloads, what you need from them.

Do those eight and delivery stops being the administrative end of the job and starts being the part that brings you the next one.