Photography Turn Around Time: Explained

Clients might sometimes see 4-6 weeks as a very long time to wait for photos.

And we don't blame you! We're excited to get your wedding photos to you just as much as you are excited to receive them.

While it’s true that it’s hard to wait, and some smaller companies may be able to get their images back sooner (especially if they only photograph 1-2 weddings a month and can spend the entire week retouching their images after the wedding), our turnaround time is pretty impressive once you know what it involves.

• The photographer uploads their images (plus images from their second photographer if you had one) to their computer. Generally, for a 7 hour wedding, most photographers are taking between 1500-2500 images (possibly double that if they had a second photographer). That comes out to ½ or ⅓ of the images being keepers. Pretty impressive when you think about how many selfies it takes me on my phone to get one that's insta-worthy!

• Your photographer will then go through one by one and hand select the best images. They have to look closely to make sure they are in focus, and choose between handfuls of near identical images to select the ones with the best expressions, exposure, as well as look at all the faces in family groups to avoid blinking, distracted, etc. We give our team 2 weeks to finish this process and get them submitted, as many of them do this on top of their day job or other photography work from your weekend.

• After the images are selected, they'll export them, and upload to our post-production team for your images will be color corrected and finally sent to Extra where you gallery is created and notifies our photo manager that they are ready. This may seem like an easy task, but to keep your images at the highest-resolution each step can take several hours at a time to process.

• Once we’ve gotten notification, we add our touch of high level service to look through every image in your gallery and ensure they are perfect. Sometimes errors happen and we'll cycle back through the process to fix any uneven lighting, blurred images or replace images. Once your gallery is perfect, we choose a cover photo, and customize the gallery information.

After all of this is completed, then we can finally send the gallery out to you! Download, share, print, and more so you can look back on your photos forever.

We've partnered with one of the best photo album providers to create unique and longlasting books with your wedding photos. Learn more about the process and ways you can customize your album to create a family heirloom with your personality