Nobody's Timeline Includes the Months After

The Monday after is stranger than anybody tells you.

Everyone has gone back to work. The flowers are on the kitchen bench doing their second day. Somebody has returned the suits. And on your phone there are eleven photographs, all of them taken by your cousin, two of them blurred, one of them a video of the speeches that cuts out at the good bit.

The actual photographs, the ones you paid four thousand dollars for and are going to look at for the next fifty years, do not exist yet. They are on a card in somebody's bag, and then on a hard drive, and then in a queue.

Every wedding planning timeline you have ever read ends on the wedding day. The thing you were mainly buying arrives a long way past the end of it.

The wait is published. Nobody puts it in the column

This is not a secret and it is not a complaint. The photographers publish it themselves, before anybody asks. In this directory, 165 photographers say in weeks how long the full gallery takes, and you can read the number straight off the page.

The median is six weeks.

The range is the part worth sitting with. It runs from two weeks to sixteen, and neither end is a freak: forty eight of the 165 publish four weeks or less, and twenty two publish twelve weeks or more. A studio on Kangaroo Island says a complete gallery can be expected within one to two weeks, and says in the same sentence that it depends on how many images need editing.

Sixteen weeks at the other end of that range is not somebody dragging their feet. It is what it takes to edit a full wedding properly when you are one person with a queue, and publishing it before anybody signs is a favour: a wait you know about is a wait you can plan around. Nobody in that range is doing anything wrong.

A couple comparing three photographers compares them on price, on hours and on whether they liked the gallery. The From column is already a mess. Underneath all of it, unread, sits the difference between a fortnight and four months for the same product, published in plain sight by the people being compared, and nobody has ever put it in a cell.

The sneak peek is the answer, and it is a good one

The photographers worked this out well before the couples did. Of the 293 photographers here who publish any turnaround at all, 143 publish a sneak peek: a small set of finished photographs, back within days, while the gallery is still weeks away.

A Canberra studio publishes more than 75 of them within 24 to 72 hours of the wedding day, and 48 hours for an elopement. Seventy five images inside three days is not a teaser. It is enough to send to your grandmother, and enough to answer the two hundred people who are asking. It turns eight weeks of silence into a wait you can survive, and it costs the photographer an evening.

A Warrnambool studio publishes three stages instead of one: a preview inside 48 hours, a fuller sneak peek within a week, then the gallery at twelve weeks with the prints, the USB and the keepsake box.

So the useful question is not how fast is the gallery. It is what arrives, when, at each stage. A photographer with three published stages has already thought about the ninety days between your wedding and your photographs, and decided you should not spend them guessing.

The album is a second clock, and you start it

Then the part that genuinely surprises people, because it is not in the turnaround figure at all.

A Perth photographer publishes wedding images at approximately six weeks, and then says the album takes a further six to ten weeks to be made once the design is approved, depending on the specifications. Read the clause in the middle. Once the design is approved. Not once the wedding happens. Once you have looked at a layout, asked for two changes, and said yes.

That clause is not one studio's quirk. An album arrives up to six weeks after you approve the final design. Two to three months after you approve the design. Different studios, different lengths, the same starting gun, and you are the one holding it.

It does not feel like a job, which is exactly how it becomes one. The design email arrives in an ordinary week in the third month, when the wedding is a photograph on the fridge and you have stopped doing wedding admin on a Tuesday night. You open it on your phone in the car, decide to look at it properly later on a real screen, and then it waits. Nobody chases you, because chasing you would be rude, and the woman waiting runs her own business and does not want to be the supplier who nags. The album turns up long after anybody planned, and almost none of that was her doing.

Films can work the same way. One studio delivers the film four to six weeks after you confirm your music with the editor. Nobody tells you that you have a job. You do.

Ask what the clock is counted from

That is the question underneath all of this, and it takes one line in an email.

Eight weeks from what? From the wedding, from the day you send your selections, from the day you approve a design, or from the day the second shooter hands over their cards? Those are four different Christmases.

And ask what happens in the busy months. A photographer shooting every weekend in February is editing four weddings at once by the middle of March, and a queue is a queue. Twenty one photographers here write it on their own websites, one of them warning that the gallery runs occasionally longer in March and November, which is somebody telling you the truth about their own year. Where it is not written down, ask. A working photographer will tell you honestly if you ask honestly.

Put it in the column

A few extra cells on the spreadsheet, next to the hours and the price.

• Sneak peek: how many images, and by when?
• Full gallery: how many weeks, counted from what?
• Album, if you are buying one: how long after you approve the design, and how long do you get to approve it?
• Film, if you are buying one: is the clock waiting on anything from you, such as the music?

Then decide what you actually want, because the fast one is not automatically better. A fortnight is wonderful if you are the sort of person who needs to see it. Sixteen weeks from somebody whose work you love is fine too, as long as you knew it was sixteen weeks when you signed, because a wait you agreed to is a different thing altogether from a wait that turns up uninvited.

What ruins it is the version nobody chose: a number you guessed at and never asked about, a date you invented for yourself, and a Tuesday somewhere in the third month where you send an email starting with the words just wondering, and feel rude for sending it.

The photographs are the last thing to arrive and the only thing that stays. Everything else at that wedding got eaten, drunk, danced on, sat in a vase or driven back to a hire company on the Sunday. Ask when the last thing turns up, put the number in the column, and then go and have the two months in between without checking your email every morning.