Guest photos as a paid add-on in your photography packages

At the pre-wedding meeting, clients often ask whether you could also collect the guests' photos, like the uncle's shot of the toast. Here's how to turn that into a paid line item that won't cost you evenings at the computer after the wedding.

In short

• Offer the guest gallery as a separate add-on, so your photos don't get mixed in with phone pictures.
• One line in your quote is enough, priced for your time, because you can't control how many photos guests upload.
• In the contract, spell out who sets up the gallery, what the client gets and by when you'll hand over the archive.

Keep your gallery and the guest gallery separate

Your gallery is curated and edited, while guests send five nearly identical shots from the dance floor. To keep your best images from getting lost among theirs, set up a separate event in Udalist for the guest photos.

Guests upload what you can't see: grandpa dancing with his granddaughter while you're shooting the cake cutting on the other side of the room.

What to put in your quote

One line is enough:

Guest photo gallery with QR code: gallery setup, QR cards for the tables, a check during the evening and archive delivery to the client. The price of one hour of your work

Base the price on your time, not on the number of photos. Setting up, checking the gallery once during the evening and handing over the archive take about an hour, whether guests upload a few dozen photos or several hundred.

If you set up the gallery yourself, include Premium in the price, because the free plan has a 50-photo limit and that's not enough for a wedding with a hundred guests. With Premium, guests upload unlimited photos and there's no watermark on them. The price is on the pricing page.

What belongs in the contract

• Who sets up the gallery. Ideally you, on your own account, because then you can see who's uploading during the evening and download the archive after the wedding.
• What the client gets. A ZIP with all the originals, or access to the gallery. Also state that editing guest photos isn't included, because after the wedding someone will ask whether you could touch up that one shot of their aunt on the dance floor.
• By when. On Premium the gallery stays available for 90 days. Write down the date by which you'll hand the archive to the client, and six months later nobody will call you asking where the photos went.

Check in just once during the evening

The best time is dinner, when the main course is going out and you're on your meal break anyway. Open the event's guest activity feed and you'll see who joined and what they uploaded.

If almost nobody has joined, ask the MC to mention the QR code on the mic before the first dance. The whole room is listening then, so photos start coming in without you. Go back to shooting, because the client isn't paying you to watch a second screen.