Why does it take so long to get your wedding photos? This question has been answered by many wedding photographers over the years (including myself in a previous article I wrote – see below), but I’ve never seen a satisfactory way of describing the reality of what our work involves.
You see, there seems to be a lot of discussion around how, when editing, ‘it takes a long time to perfect everything’ and ‘we want to make sure everything looks great.’ While that is true to a certain extent, I’ve always felt like there’s more to it when it comes to what really goes on inside the black box that is a wedding photographer’s editing process.
And that’s what I want to shed some light on.
Prefer to watch this as a video rather than read? I created a dedicated YouTube video so you can see even more of my behind-the-scenes process!:
First, I’m going to address what a wedding photographer’s work really involves. Then I’m going to address two really big elephants in the room that I need to get off my chest. 🐘🐘
By the end, you’ll understand that the reason it takes so long to edit wedding photos isn’t just because ‘we want it to be perfect and we care soooo much’ or that ‘we don’t spend 24/7 editing’ – well, duh. So let’s cautiously lift the lid on something that photographers don’t usually want to talk about.
Table of Contents
What my work *actually* involves
As a wedding photographer, my work encompasses a lot of different things. Most tasks however fall into six main buckets:
- Photographing weddings
- Post-production of wedding images (aka editing)
- Providing customer service (e.g. responding to inquiries, answering client questions, timeline run-through virtual meetings, creating and refining timelines, onboarding new clients)
- Marketing (aka content creation)
- Management of contractors (training associates, onboarding them for each wedding, reviewing clients’ wedding details, providing feedback)
- Miscellaneous and / ad hoc tasks (e.g. bookkeeping, filing taxes, completing backups, fixing computer issues, learning new software, troubleshooting anything that comes up as a small business owner)
I’ve plotted these main activities on a graph, with the Y-axis being revenue-generating tasks and the X-axis being timebound tasks.
Revenue-generating tasks vs timebound tasks
These pressing tasks are time-bound and demand my immediate attention. Whenever I’m not engaged in these more urgent aspects of the business, my focus turns to editing.
Looking at the chart above, that means that editing is only possible when the more timebound tasks are out of the way. This means there are no customer service tasks, no managing of contractors needed and no wedding to photograph at that time.
But here’s the thing.
There are highly unpredictable and variable factors involved when I sit down to work each day. And yes, I mean every day, Monday to Sunday. I have had multiple instances where due to the immense volume of emails I receive and clients I serve, I have spent from the moment I woke up until 5 in the afternoon solely replying to emails. That means that I may have woken up with the goal of knocking out some editing work, but my day didn’t play out that way.
As editing is simply not a revenue-generating task, I don’t get to leapfrog my editing tasks over the timebound tasks I had that day – even if I wanted to. I’m never going to keep a client waiting by email because I’d rather edit a wedding. So, if all I was doing was editing to please my current clients, the truth is I would quickly run the business into the ground.
How many hours does it take to edit a wedding if there are no interruptions?
This varies hugely from photographer to photographer. Search this topic on the subreddit r/weddingphotography and you’ll find some very interesting answers. On the extremely low end, some photographers boast that they can edit a full wedding, from culling to retouching, in 4 hours. I personally knew a photographer that I second-shot with once who told me she took 150 hours to edit a wedding! So it’s safe to say there is a wide range.
I tend to be a quick editor, given my years of experience and commitment to efficiency – after all, why would I want to waste my own time? For me, a good rule of thumb is it takes around 3 hours of editing per hour of shooting. This takes into account the entire process, from culling in PhotoMechanic, editing in Lightroom and retouching in Photoshop (mostly removing background people and other distractions, and zapping out any skin issues).
For more about the process of editing photos, check out the article linked below:
While the editing process per wedding is fairly quick, finding large blocks of uninterrupted time is the hard part. Why do I say uninterrupted? Because editing only goes fast when I get ‘in the zone’ and achieve a flow state of deep work where I’m attuned to the task at hand. Editing is deep work, for sure. Editing a couple of photos then attending to an email then stopping for lunch isn’t going to result in the needle moving forward by any significant degree.
How long do wedding photographers typically take to deliver photos?
The time stated in wedding photographers’ contracts ranges from 2 weeks on the shorter end, right up to 5 or even 6 months. For most photographers, their delivery timeframe falls somewhere between 4 – 12 weeks. The average is around 6-8 weeks.
Remember, we never aim to max out these timeframes. I always get photos to my clients as soon as they’re ready. To me, having unedited files on my computer is kind of like a hot potato – I really want to get it out of my lap! It’s a liability until it’s finished and delivered to the client, at least that’s how I see it!
What other photographers are saying about their delivery times
A few interesting tidbits from Reddit that other wedding photographers have shared:
- ‘For me, personally, I have an 8-week wedding deadline in my contract. It started as a factor of my early inexperience, but became a survival mechanism. Wedding photography is my only paying job, but I am a full-time parent to two little kids with a partner who works full time outside our home. When I can get into a good flow, I can deliver a full wedding in a week, but opportunities for that much concentrated time are rare. It usually doesn’t take me all the way to 8 weeks, but it sometimes does. In 8 years shooting weddings, though, I’ve never missed a deadline, and that is way more important to me than when said deadline falls.’
- ‘The editing itself is not something that takes weeks, but personally I like to leave the edits for a couple of days, and then look through them again with “fresh” eyes and then do some final adjustments.’
- ‘Many wedding photographers do weddings as a side hustle, and their day job gets in the way. Others are outsourcing everything and are at the mercy of somebody else’s production schedule. Others are just lazy, disorganized, or they simply lose interest after the shoot is over. Many probably never learned how to do the job efficiently, so post production is overwhelming’
- ‘I take 6-8 weeks to deliver full galleries, and always send ~100 sneak previews within a week of the wedding. The reason I take so long with the final gallery is that I go through each gallery 3 separate times (cull, base edit, once more for extra tweaks + retouching). Could this be crammed into 1-2 days? Of course. Would the work look rushed/not up to par as my previous galleries? 100%. IMO, people aren’t paying me to document one of the most important days for them and then rush the job. People are paying me because I take my time, and deliver an extremely cohesive gallery that has every single image fully edited, not just batch-processed in Lightroom.’
- I can knock out a wedding in a few days, but I find if I wait around a month to deliver, the clients have had time to build anticipation, settle down into married life and also start to forget details that I can then help them recall.I do send them 3-5 preview pics within 24 hours and set expectations for the delivery window at that point. I’ve done quick turnarounds in the past but these days, I feel like everyone is so used to getting everything with instant gratification that if I do, it just becomes part of the noise and they don’t take the time to really appreciate it.’
- ‘I take around 8 weeks. I have a family, and I don’t live to work. My contract (as well as my initial communication with potential clients) lists my turnaround time as 8 weeks. If a client wasn’t okay with that, they were more than welcome to move on to the next photographer they were interested in. This is my business. I run it in a way that best suits the lifestyle I am for and as long as I’m up front with my clients, then there is zero problem with that. As far as what takes so long: Sometimes I have a full day of travel to get home after a wedding. Sometimes I have a wedding the day after that wedding. Sometimes I need to give myself a day off, or god forbid, even two in a row. I might have two engagement shoots on the following day, and at some poin,t I need to respond to the emails building up, update my social media, take care of bills and annoying homeowner tasks. And this is with my youngest only in daycare two days per week. The typical hours I’m able to edit are 7pm until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. Life builds up. Wedding photographers often don’t have a 9-5 schedule to work through.’
- ‘Inexperienced photographers are probably just in over their heads, don’t have a workflow down, might have a day job and other demands. Or the photographer was avoiding the work and communication due to anxiety or they simply don’t care about the final product. Experienced photographers who take too long are probably just lazy or prefer to prioritize their own needs and wants over putting in some time editing. If you can’t or won’t edit – then pay someone else to and just get it over with.’
- ‘Part of it is psychology and marketing. Could I deliver within 1 week? Sure. If you were to renovate your kitchen today. Would you pick the guy that shows up tomorrow? Or the guy that won’t show up till next month for the estimate?’
All very interesting thoughts that give an insight into the experiences and perspectives of other wedding photographers, not just me!
How many weddings do we shoot?
More context and background that will make all of this make sense: how many weddings do I / my team shoot? During peak season, which spans from March until November in the San Francisco Bay Area, my business typically covers 2 to 4 weddings per week.
During the absolute busiest stretches, this be as many as 7 or 8 weddings in a single week. This isn’t purely me shooting all these weddings – I have a team of associate photographers whose work also needs to be edited.
In a typical year, we shoot almost exactly 100 weddings. In the extremely crazy year of 2022, we shot 149 weddings.
How the editing backlog comes about
Given my shooting schedule, the variable time available for editing, and the fact that I’m editing for a whole team of photographers, by the time I finish up a particularly grueling wedding week, my backlog has already grown significantly.
Rather than editing the wedding I just photographed, I’m likely working on a wedding that took place several weeks prior, with the backlog constantly expanding as we shoot new events.
Factoring in the hours per wedding, the unpredictable editing time, and the growing backlog toward the end of wedding season, it typically takes me a few weeks to work through the existing queue and start on the latest wedding I photographed. Therefore, I only max out my editing timeline during the tail-end of wedding season each year (October – December), never the beginning of the year when turnaround times are at their fastest.
As an example, I have created this spreadsheet, based on a snapshot of my actual shooting & editing schedule for the 2024 season (but with fake names generated by Chat GPT to respect my clients’ privacy).
Let’s say you’re Harper and Benjamin. It’s November 4th. You’ve just enjoyed a beautiful wedding day. You’re wondering when the photos will be ready! After all, it only takes a few hours to edit the photos, surely? Plus, your wedding was only 2.5 hours as it was at City Hall. That must be super quick to get through!
However, looking at my schedule, I’m still working on Yuna and Minsoo’s wedding which took place in late September and was 20 weddings ago! That means I have to edit 20 weddings of varying numbers of hours of coverage before I even start on your wedding.
Looking at the editing schedule, you’ll see several 8-hour weddings to process as well, that I’d have to get through before I reach yours. So no matter how short your wedding day, there’s still the preceding weddings to take into consideration.
Why take on so many weddings if I can’t edit them all quickly?
Here’s the first elephant in the room. 🐘 People may be thinking ‘why don’t you just take fewer weddings to speed up delivery times?’. The logic seems simple at first – fewer weddings should mean faster turnarounds. But the reality of running a wedding photography business is more complex.
Wedding photography has natural rhythms. Most couples want to get married in peak season. Turning down weddings during busy periods wouldn’t create more editing time – it would just mean saying no to couples who want to work with us, while still having the same business operations to manage during the week.
The 2-month delivery timeframe comes from years of experience finding the sweet spot between running a sustainable business and delivering consistent quality. Each wedding gets proper attention during editing, while keeping our prices reasonable for each couple by maintaining a healthy shooting schedule.
In fact, the year that the above spreadsheet came from (2024), I realized I needed to make a change to my business, pronto. I was editing literally every waking moment – only stopping to eat or use the bathroom. I stopped working out, seeing friends, spending time with my husband, watching TV. And still, the editing backlog was only growing – as weeks went by, I shot more weddings than I edited. I was burnt out, overwhelmed, and living in a constant state of dread, hoping that clients wouldn’t be angry.
What is my wedding gallery delivery timeframe?
Some very understanding clients and a few late-night soul-searching sessions later, I realized that my previous 6-7 week timeframe was not working – at least for end-of-season weddings.
That was when I decided to raise my timeframe up to 2 months.
Bear in mind, it’s unlikely it will actually be two months until you receive your final wedding photos. The only time of year that I will certainly max out my delivery window is for weddings that take place during the months of October, November and December. I will always be leaps and bounds quicker delivering a March wedding than a November one.
Aside from that, the two-month timeframe also involves a contingency. This is in case of unforeseen life events or any circumstances where I cannot edit when I had planned to. This includes the death of a loved one, illness, accident, moving house and just about anything else life can throw at a person. We always want to underpromise and overdeliver.
Why not outsource the editing?
OK, now the second elephant in the room 🐘 I need to address: why not outsource my editing? There’s no reason why I as the lead photographer and owner of the business need to be the one to edit everything personally, right?
The truth is, I worked with an editing team for years. They would handle the culling and Lightroom editing of all our weddings. Then abruptly one day, they permanently shut down, effective immediately. All that time I had spent training them, providing feedback through email and video recordings, gone. The trust of that relationship, gone. And with it, honestly, my ability to trust another editing team.
But there’s another reason too.
Editing teams like the one I worked with are honestly a dime a dozen. The one I used is no longer around, but the others work in the same way.
They can do a somewhat passable job of culling down from the mass of photos taken to the keeper images. (No small feat, as at an 8-hour wedding with two photographers, I come away with between 10,000 – 15,000 raw files).
The editors I used provided somewhat consistent, high-quality results. But every time they provided a finished catalog back to me, I had to check their work. Frequently I would find bad shots being included, while once-in-a-lifetime GREAT photos I’d painstakingly taken were carelessly tossed out and left on the digital cutting-room floor.
Plus, their turnaround times were not much faster than mine – I would still have to wait 4 – 5 weeks until I’d get a culled, Lightroom-edited catalog back from them (no doubt the long wait was because the volume of work from my team was too much for the one or two editors that worked on my stuff).
THEN, I would still have to carefully review everything, provide feedback when inevitably they’d messed something up, THEN I would still have to do the work of running the AI-denoising in Lightroom, reordering, renaming, exporting, doing all the Photoshop adjustments including sometimes outsourcing that to my dedicated retouching team if I didn’t have the skills to complete it myself.
It was still tight to complete within the 6-7 week timeline! It was expensive, and not done to the same high standard I would have done, were I personally editing them.
So I decided to stick with personally editing all our weddings myself – at least for the time being, until I can find someone who will do the entire editing process for me, not only culling and basic Lightroom edits. Alas, such a service does not exist, so it would probably be a case of me hiring a full-time, in-house editor as a salaried employee.
Backlogs are baked into the business model
A wedding photography business flows much like a restaurant on a busy Saturday night. The kitchen keeps taking new reservations while cooking meals for tables that arrived an hour ago. Each table gets served in sequence, and the flow continues smoothly throughout the night.
Wedding photography follows this same pattern. The shooting schedule runs parallel to the editing schedule. While I’m editing January’s weddings, February’s weddings are happening. When I’m editing February’s weddings, March’s celebrations are in full swing. This continuous cycle means working through weddings in the order they happened, while new ones are being photographed. During busier seasons, like late fall, the gap widens between what I’m shooting and what I’m editing.
Every wedding gets its dedicated editing time. The timeline stays consistent and predictable. Taking on fewer weddings wouldn’t speed up this process; we’d just serve fewer couples while maintaining the same workflow pattern, meaning we would have to up our prices.
Our couples understand this timeline from the start. They know their wedding will be edited in sequence, just like every other couple’s celebration, with the same attention to detail and care that’s built my business’ reputation.
We’re upfront about this timeline with all our couples from day one. It’s an important question to ask any potential wedding photographers you’re considering. If extremely speedy turnaround times are important to you, there are many out there that deliver in just a couple of weeks, or even mere days.
But then you have to wonder, how are they delivering so quickly? Are they outsourcing the editing to the lowest bidder? Are they trusting AI tools to cull and edit without looking at them? Are they really doing any processing at all, or just slapping a filter on all the photos they took and uploading them?
The importance of my hand in the editing process
My clients expect me to have intimate knowledge of each venue, especially San Francisco City Hall’s unique lighting and architecture. Every image needs careful attention to detail, from removing distracting elements to ensuring perfect skin tones under the building’s varied lighting conditions. This level of refinement takes time and can’t be rushed or delegated without compromising quality.
The timeline I provide is about delivering images that meet my exacting standards, images that you’ll treasure for generations. When you book with me, you’re getting an artist and a storyteller who’s committed to crafting the visual story of your day.
Yes, it takes time, but I believe your memories deserve nothing less than my absolute best work.
I hope this helps explain why your gallery takes the time it does to prepare. While I’m always working to improve my workflow and delivery times, I won’t compromise on the quality that brought you to my brand in the first place. Thank you for trusting me with your memories – I promise they’re worth the wait.
Zoe Larkin
I’m Zoe, a wedding photographer based in San Francisco! My style is candid, capturing authentic moments for my couples all over the Bay Area and Northern California. Creating content is my passion! Follow along the blog and Insta!