Weddingbee Blog

One of the compromises we had to make to keep our wedding somewhere in the neighborhood of the budget was to get only six hours with our photographer (instead of the full day or the duration of our eight hour event). That doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time, so we expect that we’ll have to focus on portraits and the major events of the evening (although maybe if everyone gets on the dance floor, we’ll get all of them there!). There are a lot of guests who probably won’t turn up much in our professional wedding pictures, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want good pictures of them!

For a minute we thought of putting disposable cameras on the tables à la Miss Cola, but the quality of those photos never seems to be that great and we figured we’d spend a lot of money on developing 20 rolls for maybe six useful pictures, if we were lucky. We also thought about renting a photobooth (or setting up a fauxtobooth!), but financial and time restrictions sort of precluded both. Then, finally, it hit me: put the guests to work!

Hopefully not (source)

Like many a bride before me, I decided it would be great(!) to have an online photo sharing space where guests could upload their photos and I could see them! Not all of our guests are on Facebook, and I didn’t want to download every small, low quality JPEG file, anyway, so I started exploring my photo sharing options.

First, I tried Flickr. I had a really hard time figuring out how guests could share their photos without creating a new account with a username and password, so I kept looking.

Next I found iRave. It looked promising, but I had absolutely no idea how much storage space it offered and I couldn’t find the information anywhere I looked on the site. I didn’t want to find out I’d run out of space after I’d given guests the information!

I kept getting recommendations to try Picasa, and that was the service I ultimately chose. Upgrading the account was less expensive than with Flickr, and Picasa let me choose the email address for guests to send pictures to (as well as the URL to share photos, via my username), which I think will be easier than the random email addresses I hear Flickr uses.

The next challenge was how to let everyone know where to send their photos. I put the information on our wedding website, but the truth is, out of 361 visits to the site, I’m sure about 350 of them were from me. So, I got the idea awhile back from Weddingbee reader kjpugs to create business cards with the information!

After going to VistaPrint and downloading their business card template, I went back to my invitation proofs and yanked the border image for one final project.

Crowning glory? Replacing the dot on the exclamation mark with a tiny little ♥. Of course, given that it’s only 3 pt, I doubt anyone will notice!

Here’s what the final result looked like.

On the back, we printed our monogram, just because we didn’t want it blank. In hindsight, this would have been a great place to put table numbers and use them as escort cards! Since I didn’t think of it in time, I insist that (at least!) one of you go make adorable business card-sized envelopes using this template (or you can buy pre-made plain ones) with your guests’ names on the outside, and a cute photo sharing business card on the inside (with the table number on the back, of course!). This will ensure that your guests at least pick up the card… whether they remember to take it with them is another matter. I think the awesomeness of this idea is impossible to deny… so much so that I haven’t actually ruled out reprinting these cards and doing it. I’m still looking for ways to justify the time and expense.

Did you come up with any genius ideas after the fact? Share them here, so that maybe someone else can take advantage!