Published · 2 min read
How to deliver a wedding gallery in 48 hours instead of six weeks
The six-week turnaround is not caused by editing time. It is caused by four queues that only move when you sit down at the desk. Here is how to remove three of them.
Ask a photographer why galleries take six weeks and you will hear "editing". Time the actual work and editing is rarely more than a fifth of it.
The four queues
Queue one: ingest. Cards sit in the bag until you get to the desk. Two days, sometimes five, and nothing is happening.
Queue two: culling. The genuinely slow part, and the one most likely to get postponed because it is boring rather than hard.
Queue three: editing. The part you actually trained for. This is real work and it takes real time.
Queue four: export and upload. Hours of machine time, but scheduled around you — it starts when you press the button, and you press it when you are at the desk.
Only queue three needs a photographer. The other three are waiting for you to be in the room.
Removing the first queue
Offload on the day, or the moment you get home, before anything else. Not editing — just copying. Everything downstream is blocked until the files exist somewhere, so getting them off the cards is the highest-leverage ten minutes of the whole job.
Removing the second
This is what automated culling is for. Run it during the ingest, so by the time you sit down the shortlist exists and you are reviewing decisions rather than making them from scratch.
Removing the fourth
Export and upload are machine work. They should run overnight without you, triggered as soon as the edit is finished, not the following morning when you remember.
What is left
Editing. Which, on a 400-frame delivered set with a proper anchor-and-sync workflow, is one to two sittings — not six weeks.
The part clients actually notice
Here is the thing worth knowing: couples do not compare your turnaround to other photographers'. They compare it to the phone photos their guests posted the same night.
You are not competing with six weeks. You are competing with instant. Anything you can get in front of them in the first few days — a preview set, the guest galleries, even fifty frames — resets the whole comparison.
- delivery
- workflow
- clients