How to collect every photo from your wedding day

The short version: pick one way for guests to share photos, decide it before the invitations go out, put it physically on the tables, and say it out loud once during the speeches. Everything below is detail on those four things.

The five steps

1. 1

   Decide how, months ahead — not the week before

   Whatever you choose — a shared album, a hashtag, a photo link, cameras on the tables — decide it early enough that it can appear on the printed things. The couples who end up with nothing are almost always the ones who thought about it in the last fortnight, when the stationery was already at the printer.

2. 2

   Put it where the phone already is

   A sign by the door gets read once, on the way in, by people carrying coats. A card on the table sits next to the menu for four hours, at eye level, while people are already holding their phones. If you only do one thing from this list, do this one — placement beats every other variable.

3. 3

   Say it once, out loud

   One sentence during the speeches is worth more than any amount of signage, because it makes the first few people do it while everyone is watching. Ask whoever is speaking to add it to the end of their bit. Do not make an announcement of it — a line in passing works better than an instruction.

4. 4

   Tell your photographer, and tell the venue

   Photographers are generally glad of it, but they would rather hear it from you than find cards on the tables on the day. Ask the venue about signal too — a stone-walled barn with no reception changes what will work, and it is much easier to find out in advance than at seven in the evening.

5. 5

   Decide who is looking at them, and when

   You will not be checking photos on your wedding day, and you should not plan to. Either accept that everything appears as it arrives, or ask one person — a sibling, a friend who is not in the wedding party — to be the one who glances at them. Agree this beforehand so it is not a question at eleven at night.

The three things that go wrong

• Asking people to install something. Every extra step loses a proportion of your guests, and installing an app at a party loses most of them. Whatever you use should work by opening a link, or it will only be used by the people who were going to send you photos anyway.

• Relying on a hashtag. It only reaches guests who post publicly on the one platform you picked, it misses everything shot but never posted — which is most of it — and you cannot download any of it at full quality afterwards.

• Leaving the collecting until afterwards. The window for asking people for their photos is about a week. After that you are chasing, they are busy, and the ones who do reply send you four compressed images out of the sixty they took. Collect on the day or accept a fraction of them.

Afterwards

Download everything early rather than at the deadline, and put a copy somewhere that is not the same place as the first copy — the photos of your wedding are worth a second hard drive. Whatever service you use, check how long it keeps them: ours holds them for 90 days on the Plus plan and then deletes them for good, and most alternatives have some equivalent limit buried in their terms. Find out what yours is before you need to know.

See how this works for a wedding