I see this question pop up from time to time, especially on social media, couples often wonder why it’s taking such a long time to get their wedding images back from the wedding.

Today, I want to explore the reasons why that is, what is a fair timeframe to get everything back and why you should be patient in getting them back.

The post-production process for wedding photographers

Truth be told, what you see is just the tip of the iceberg in what wedding photographers do, taking pictures on your wedding day.

On average, a wedding photographer can spend upwards of 3 hours in post-production for every hour spent at the wedding taking images.

Now, some may take longer, some may take shorter, but 3:1 is an average within the wedding industry.

That means, for example, if your wedding photographer will be at the wedding for 8 hours, then you can expect them to roughly work 24 hours on the wedding images.

This is where the bulk of your pricing for them comes into play, not how long they are hanging around at your wedding.

What Are They Doing?

Lot’s actually.

Once a photographer gets back into their office or studio, the smart ones should be making copies of all their raw files.

Depending on how many images were taken, just making a couple of copies of everything and organizing it can take a few hours time.

Once that’s complete, many will try to quickly go through and pick out a handful of images to create a ‘teaser’ for the couple, something they can quickly give to the couple for sharing on social media.

Those two things alone can take upwards of a day to do.

From there, photographers have a taunting task of going through hundreds, if not thousands of images, weeding out duplicates that don’t look right, ones that may be out of focus, over or underexposed images, and the like.

While doing so, many will open up Adobe Lightroom or their favorite editor and start the process of editing and process them.

What types of editing does a photographer do?

When it comes to editing, many will take the raw image and change the coloring, lighting, and or saturation. This is a process that simply takes time and for some, it can be a challenge.

Many photographers will use something called a LUT or Look Up Table.

It stands for ‘Look Up Tables’, and a LUT (pronounced loot) is basically a conversion profile that takes a color value in your original file, looks it up in a table, and returns a new color value.

Here’s an example.

What does processing them mean anyway?

Processing is a bit different, it’s the process of taking a file called a raw file and transforming it into a jpg file so you can view and print it if needed.

While that is a much more simple process than editing, it’s still time-consuming on the computer systems.

Some photographers choose only to process the images, while most will edit and process or at least edit a number of them and process the others.

What is a good time frame for us to get our images back?

The answer is it depends on many factors.

Those can include how many weddings the photographer has in their work queue, how fast they work, and what needs to be done.

Typically though, an average wedding photographer with 25 weddings a year should take roughly 4-6 weeks to get your images back to you.

I’ve seen some take upwards of three months and others take just a couple of weeks.

You should have a good idea of their timeframe and it should be in writing.

Additionally, you’ll want to make sure it’s in the contract, we, for example, provide an estimated range of 3-4 weeks, however, we also state that if it takes longer, we will let the couple know.

Why you should be patient on getting wedding images back?

Listen, we completely get it you want to see all those wedding day images to put on the wall, share with friends and family, and of course, put on your social media pages.

But, I will tell you, rushing a photographer and emailing them every other day will only slow down the process.

Be patient.

If you don’t hear from them every other week in text or email, just reach out and ask for update status.

You WANT your images to be the best they can be, rushing a job will just slow down that process and there is a chance your images will not be as great either.

How many images can we expect to get back from a wedding photographer?

Again, that’s going to depend on a bunch of factors, however, we do have an estimator tool that you can use to get a general idea.

While all photographers will be different, you can calculate an estimate based on the number of photographers, how long they will be at the wedding, and their experience.

What we can tell you though is that for all the images that the photographer will take, you’ll only get a portion of them back.