Should We Invest in a Wedding Album?

If you’re wondering, “Should we invest in a wedding album?” you’re not alone. Every year, more than 2 million couples get married in the United States, and every one of them find themselves asking this same question.

When we first started our wedding photography business in 2018, we didn’t know the first thing about wedding albums. It had been years since we’d designed and ordered our own wedding album, and the biggest thing we remembered about the experience was how overwhelming and time consuming it was. How were we supposed to decide which images to include and which to leave out?

Since then we’ve learned a lot about the process of designing and manufacturing albums, and about the psychology behind why they are such an essential part of the wedding photography process, and today we’re going to make the case for why it’s worth setting aside a piece of your wedding budget to invest in a professionally designed, heirloom wedding album.

Why should we invest in a wedding album?

Avoid Overwhelm & Procrastination

Let me tell you the story of when we ordered our wedding album. We absolutely loved our photographer (shoutout to you Danny!) and he did a wonderful job capturing our wedding day. We had so many precious images to choose from – time to start the album design process!

But life got busy. Lee went back to school. Lacey started a business. Quality time to spend together became an even more precious thing, and using that time to painstakingly go through each folder in our gallery to choose which images should be preserved on paper and which ones shouldn’t didn’t sound like much fun.

Months passed, then years. Finally, about 3 years after we got married, we set our minds to the task and worked together to design our album page by page. It arrived on our doorstep a month or so later, and let me tell you – opening it for the first time was a powerful experience. But that experience would have been that much more powerful if it had been 3 months after we got married, not 3 years.

This is why we include full service album design for all of our couples. We design the first draft of your full story wedding album, using our artistic vision and curation to guide our editorial decisions. We think about what’s important to you, your family and the precious moments you’ll always remember from the wedding day. In short, we do the heavy lifting so you can get to that precious moment of opening your album for the first time that much faster and easier.

Preserve Your Legacy

Imagine it’s many, meany years in the future. Your family is coming over for a holiday dinner. Grandchildren run around the living room, playing games and laughing. One of them picks up your wedding album off of the coffee table and asks to hear the story of your wedding day. You leaf through the pages and within an instant you’re transported back to how that day felt. As you tell the story, your grandchild is transported there with you.

Once the sparkler smoke has settled and the thank you gifts are sent, all that will remain of your wedding day are the images and video (if you choose to hire a videographer). In our humble (and not at all biased, I’m sure) opinion images have this unique capacity to capture human emotion in a way that makes it relatable to others. Or maybe translatable is the right word.

Either way, the images captured on your wedding day may well be the best tool you have to show your friends, family members and perhaps even your future children what your wedding day looked like, but also how it FELT for you and your partner in the moments before and after you got married.

This is a truly essential piece of your legacy as a married couple, so it’s worth investing in an album that is made to stand the test of time.

Technology is Unreliable

There’s a saying in our line of work: it’s not a matter of IF one of your hard drives is going to fail, it’s a matter of WHEN. L+L Couples who have been on a consultation call with us know how seriously we take data redundancy and safety. We believe in back ups, on back ups, on back ups which is why we shoot on dual memory cards in our cameras, and have a full wedding back up completed the night of the wedding, just to be safe.

And even though we deliver our client images in an online gallery, and encourage our couples to have multiple hard drive back ups at multiple locations – all of those back up options still rely on technology, internet and/or electricity to function, and as such they still carry some risk. Don’t believe me? Pull up your old MySpace profile and show me some of the photos you had on there. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Don’t roll the dice with your legacy. Images printed on paper are far more likely to last a lifetime, especially if the album manufacturers guarantee the album for life (as ours do). So preserve and protect your images with an heirloom album.

Nostalgia Is Better on Paper

Last but not least, nostalgia is just better on paper, plain and simple. When was the last time you got together with your family, gathered everyone around a computer and pulled up all those old digital family photos from back in the day?

Yeah, that’s never happened to me either. Mostly because even if you did have those old photos, the hard drive or computer they are stored on is probably ancient and runs extremely slowly.

Printed images are tangible and tactile. They have texture. The pages of an album that has been cherished over a long time will smell like the home in which it was so loved. Passing the book back and forth, turning the pages one by one – these are meaningful actions that fire up those nostalgic parts of the brain and help us to be transported to the moments in the images.

We hope this has helped to shed a light on why we believe so strongly in the value of printed wedding images, and why the album process has become such an essential aspect of how we serve and support our couples.

Our wish is that every one of our L+L Couples will have a long and joyful marriage that lasts a lifetime, and that our work, printed in an heirloom album, will help support and strengthen their legacy in the years to come. Because these are the images that will transport them and their loved ones back to the day they said their vows and set forth on this wild adventure we call lifelong love and marriage.

With all the love,

L+L

If you enjoyed this post about why you should invest in a wedding album, make sure to check out our post about How to Pick the Perfect Ceremony Start Time. Interested booking your wedding, or an intimate engagement session with your person? Give us a shout right here!

Lacey + Lee Photography is a wife-husband photography team based in Austin, Texas who specialize in creating bright, timeless and romantic wedding and elopement photography. Within the Austin Area they serve South Congress, East 6th, South Lamar, The Seaholm District, Mueller, Dripping Springs, Kyle, Hutto, Georgetown, Round Rock, Pflugerville, Cedar Park, and Bastrop. They also serve San Antonio, New Braunfels, San Marcos, Waco, Dallas, Houston, and any State or National Park you get to by plane, train or automobile. They are available for destination weddings, proposals, elopements and micro weddings.