How to send wedding photos to clients

Before you send: agree on the plan

Most delivery stress comes from expectations nobody wrote down. Put these points in your contract or your booking email, so the couple knows what is coming:

• When. A date for the sneak peek and a date range for the full gallery.
• What. Roughly how many edited photos to expect, and whether the film comes with the same link or separately.
• How. Everything arrives as one link they can open on a phone, and they should download and keep their own copy.
• Choices. Whether they pick photos for an album or prints, and how they do it.

Step 1: send a sneak peek

A small set of strong photos, sent within days of the wedding, buys you patience for the full edit and gets shared while the excitement is still there. Choose a dozen or so images that tell the day: a portrait, the ceremony, a detail, the dance floor. Send them as a small gallery or as lighter web-size files, never as attachments squeezed into an email.

Step 2: cull, edit and export twice

Once the edit is done, export two versions of every photo:

• Full resolution for prints and albums: high-quality JPEGs at the size you shot or cropped.
• Web size for phones and social media, with a long edge of around 2,000 pixels. These open fast, and they are what most guests will actually share.

Name the files so they sort in the order of the day, for example the couple's names followed by a sequence number. Avoid camera file names: they mean nothing to the couple, and they get mixed up when two cameras were used.

Step 3: organise the day into chapters

A wedding is a story with a running order. Split the photos into chapters such as Getting ready, Ceremony, Portraits and Reception, and put your strongest image first in each one. Couples rarely scroll through hundreds of photos in one go; chapters let them find the first kiss without hunting for it.

Step 4: write the delivery message

The message is the first thing the couple reads, so make it personal and practical. A good one includes:

1. A line or two about their day, written by you rather than copied from a template.
2. The link, and the password in a separate message if there is one.
3. How to download: everything at once or photo by photo, and which size to choose for what.
4. A request to keep their own copy in two places, such as a computer and a backup drive.
5. What happens next: favourites for the album, prints, or the film if it comes later.

Doing it without a special tool

If you deliver with Google Drive or another shared folder, you can still follow every step above:

• Make one folder per wedding, with numbered subfolders for each chapter (01 Getting ready, 02 Ceremony and so on) and a separate folder for the web-size files.
• Share the folder so anyone with the link can view it, then open it in a private browser window to see exactly what the couple will see.
• Put the download instructions in a short PDF at the top of the folder.
• Ask the couple to send their favourites as a list of file numbers, which is where the sequence numbers pay off.

WeTransfer is fine for the sneak peek or a handover to an album designer, but free transfer links expire after a few days, and the full gallery deserves a link that stays put. The trade-off with a folder is presentation: the couple sees thumbnails and file names instead of a gallery, and picking favourites means typing numbers into an email.

How Aurant does it

1. Upload at full resolution. Aurant keeps your files as you exported them and never recompresses them, and they keep their names.
2. Build the gallery from the same files. Choose a cover design (you can open every one as a sample on the templates page) and a cover photo.
3. Protect it if you want to. The couple enters a password before the gallery opens. You can also put your name or logo on every image they see, while the originals stay clean.
4. Send one link. The couple opens it in any browser, on a phone or a computer, with no account and no app. They browse lighter previews so the gallery opens quickly, and download the originals when you allow it.
5. Get favourites without the email chain. The couple chooses favourites in the gallery, and you see every choice, ready for the album conversation.

The film can go out the same way: films play straight from the link, in HD on any connection, so family can watch before anyone downloads. For a deeper setup, read the guide to delivering wedding photos and films without WeTransfer or Google Drive.

A full wedding at full resolution can be larger than the free plan's 5 GB, so compare the storage of each plan on the pricing page before you upload.