Choosing Photos for Your Wedding Website
Photos are what turn a wedding website into your wedding website. The same design sings with good photos; with bad photos, or none, it looks like an unused template. The good news: you don’t need many — half a dozen well chosen is plenty — and you don’t need a professional crew. You need judgement, and that’s exactly what this article gives you.
Pre-wedding shoot: yes or no?
The pre-wedding (engagement) shoot — an hour or two with a photographer, weeks before the wedding — is the ideal source of material: recent photos, careful light, and both of you at ease in front of the camera (a skill that takes practice, which is why many photographers bundle the shoot in: it doubles as a rehearsal with you).
Is it worth paying for separately if it’s not included? That depends on your archive. If you already have photos together that you love, it’s not essential. If a search reveals that every couple photo you own is a cropped selfie or a screenshot from six years ago, the shoot is the most efficient fix: one session produces the cover photo, the section photos and even the save-the-date.
Phone photos that actually work
A modern phone takes photos that are technically more than good enough for a website. The problems are never the camera — they’re the selection. What works:
- Plenty of natural light. The sunset walk, the summer terrace. Skip the indoor shots under yellow bulb light.
- Genuinely candid. One stolen laugh on a trip beats ten stiff poses.
- Landscape, with breathing room. Covers and headers want horizontal formats and space around you; a tightly cropped vertical portrait fits poorly.
- The original resolution. Retrieve the photo from the phone’s own gallery, not the recompressed copy someone forwarded on WhatsApp: on a large screen the difference is enormous.
And a warning about filters: the whole site should share one consistent tone. Mixing an oversaturated shot, a black-and-white one and a vintage-filtered one reads as a collage. Pick one style and apply it to all.
Once your photos are chosen, the website is the easy part: upload them, place them, and preview the result instantly.
Create my invitation for freeImage rights: two minutes that prevent headaches
Two fronts worth getting straight:
- Your photographer’s photos. The shoot or wedding contract specifies what you may do with them. Practically all photographers allow a personal wedding website (they love the exposure), but read the clause; some ask for a credit line.
- Photos featuring other people. If friends or family appear in your gallery, the graceful move is telling them before you publish — especially where children appear. This is also where the website’s own privacy matters: a page kept out of Google, or protected by an access code, makes publishing personal photos far more reasonable. We cover it in depth in how to keep your wedding website private.
What you should never use: stock photos of “generic couples”. They’re spotted instantly and convey exactly the opposite of what you want.
Place them one by one, between sections
The textbook mistake is dumping 30 photos into a grid gallery at the bottom of the page. Nobody looks at them and the site loads three times slower. The trick used by editorially designed sites — the well-laid-out-magazine feel — is the opposite: few photos, large, placed one at a time between sections.
The logic is rhythm: a block of content, a visual breath, a block of content. After the schedule, a full-width photo of the two of you; between the map and the RSVP, another. Each image commands attention because it competes with nothing, and long sections read without fatigue. With 4 to 6 well-placed photos the whole page feels custom-designed; it’s one of the highest-impact moves from our ideas for your wedding website.
The final cut
A good distribution for a complete site: 1 cover photo (your best, landscape, with room for the text), 3–5 photos interleaved between sections, and at most one mini-gallery of 6 if you want to tell your story. Before publishing, open the site on a phone: any photo that looks blurry, awkwardly cropped or slow to load gets cut. Five impeccable photos beat twenty average ones — on wedding websites, as in albums, the edit is the style.
Creating and previewing your invitation with RSVP is free — no card, no time limit. You only pay a one-time €49 when you publish.
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