Wedding Blog
Like several Bees before me, I will be making cards for our guests with instructions on where to go to upload their digital photos after our wedding. I have also included a handy link to it on our wedding website.
I had originally been working on integrating a photo gallery on our wedding website. Guests would be able to view photos, comment on them, upload their own, and download photos others had uploaded. In fact, I was pretty much done coding it, except for allowing multiple uploads at once, when I came across Shutterfly’s Share Sites. It allows you to create a custom website for this very purpose, and included all the things I had been writing myself, but in a more user-friendly fashion. I decided not to reinvent the wheel and save myself some time.
This is the first page you come to on the site. You can see that I’ve already uploaded a few of our engagement photos. To upload photos, our guests will need a Shutterfly account. The “Sign Up” link opens a window on the page that only asks for name, email, and password, so it’s quick and easy to create one.
Shutterfly has a fairly intuitive upload process, where you can upload as many pictures as you want all at once. They don’t allow files over about 10 MB, but only a few of our professional engagement photos were larger than that, so I don’t think most people will even notice the cap.
Guests can upload photos to existing albums, or they can create their own.
Clicking on a picture will take you to a bigger version. Here you can see who uploaded the picture, order prints, or download it to your hard drive.
Unlike some photo sharing sites, downloading the full resolution photo is free. Guests can also comment on the photo.
That’s pretty easy, right? Since our professional photos won’t be available for months after our wedding, we hope to have lots of non-pro pictures to feast our eyes on when we return from our honeymoon!
How will you be collecting photos from your guests?
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Wow!!!! I love Shutterfly because of their photobooks but the fact they have this new product makes it even better; especially the download feauture.
Miss Fondue, don’t take this the wrong way, but you look HOT on that pic!
That’s a great idea that Shutterfly has! I love their photo services! I may steal your idea!
That is such a great idea! I was planning on using facebook with younger guests, but soemthing like that would allow everyone to join!
Honestly, this was the best decision I made. I set up a Pro Flickr site, put the photo cards EVERYWHERE (OoT bags, guest book signing table, brought them to brunch the next day) and within 3 days of the wedding, I had 400+ pictures uploaded to the site. Now, 4 weeks later, I have almost 800 pics on the site. The site was perfect right after the wedding because I got to see myself in my wedding dress, and the site is even better now that I have my pro pics back because the guest pics capture a ton of action!
I was going to go the Flickr route for my photosharing cards but I really didn’t want to pay for the Pro site. The Snapfish site is perfect for us, thank you for this!!
I love this idea and plan on having our guests share their photos with us! I had no idea that Shutterfly had a photo sharing feature. Thanks for sharing this!! 
This is incredibly helpful… thanks for such a detailed explanation!
This is great info, and ps your eyebrows look phenomenal in that last pic!!!
@El Capataz and @kelly: Aww, thanks! My hair and make-up was done by the same person who will be doing it for the wedding, so I hope I look just as good on that day as well!
I love the idea. Just a bit of warning, I did a shutterfly share album with some girlfriends last year, but for some reason not everyone could figure it out. So just make sure you provide clear instructions. And yes, you do look hot in that pic!!
This is so awesome! We were just going to have everyone email them to us, but this is so much cooler! Thank you for sharing this 
We’re also considering this route and hopefully our guests can figure it out!
@Miss Peep Toe: Thanks for the warning! I did type up a tutorial with photos to put on our website, but I’ll include some basic instructions on the card as well! And thanks! 
I can’t impress enough how important it is to talk about the photo sharing site all the time BEFORE the wedding and have reminders about it wherever you can place them. It’s a new enough concept that I just can’t seem to get most of my guests to do it. Dang, you look so hot in that pic I keep scrolling up to see it again!
Thanks for posting about this! It’s good to know Shutterfly lets you customize your page. I am planning to host my own gallery at my site, but I might look into this too.
I was wondering what to do, if it was worth it to code something myself or if i should use something out there already. I was thinking of simply letting people upload to wherever they link and then emailing me the link to post on our website.
This seems like a better idea though.
Do they have a limit on space?
@Lissy: They advertise free, unlimited photo storage, so I don’t believe so, except for the size limit on individual files that I mentioned.
I love this idea. Thanks for “sharing”!
How did you word the actual cards? I really want to do this but I don’t know how to word them.
[...] are doing a Shutterfly website so that our guests can share the pictures of the BIG event and using Miss Kitten’s idea for [...]
[...] The navigation bar provided links, so our guests could learn how we met, our engagement story, and all those other usual little items you find on wedding websites. I won’t bore you with showing all these pages, but you can see that the navigational buttons had a drop-down menu to provide more choices. (The “Photos” link went to our Shutterfly page.) [...]
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Miss Fondue, Nashville
Age and Occupation: 27, Technical Analyst
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 25, Network Admin Student/Senior Game Advisor
Engagement Date: December 25, 2007
Wedding Date: May 2009
Blogging Since: September 14, 2008
Venue: Ravenwood Golf Club
About Me: I’m your average computer geek marrying a gaming geek and trying to find a good balance of elegance and geek chic in our wedding. I adore The Sims, Nintendo, cosplay, (good) music, TiVo, theme parks, and our two crazy felines.
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