Guide · 6 min read
How many wedding photos to deliver, and how fast
There’s no single right number. There is a right way to set expectations, so couples are delighted rather than surprised.
By the SendShoot team · Updated
How many photos is normal?
Ask ten wedding photographers and you’ll get ten answers. Style changes everything. A documentary photographer covering every moment will deliver more than someone who works in a slower, posed style. Guest count, the number of locations and whether there’s a second shooter all push the number up.
A rule of thumb many photographers use is 50 to 100 edited photos per hour of coverage. Treat it as a starting point for your own numbers, not a promise:
| Coverage | Rough range at 50–100 per hour |
|---|---|
| 4 hours | 200 to 400 photos |
| 6 hours | 300 to 600 photos |
| 8 hours | 400 to 800 photos |
| 10 hours | 500 to 1,000 photos |
Quality beats quantity. Couples remember the gallery that made them cry, not the one with 40 near-identical confetti frames. Cull hard and deliver your best.
How long should delivery take?
Turnaround depends on your season and your editing workload. Many photographers send a small set of sneak peeks within days and the full gallery several weeks later. Whatever your timing, the rule is the same: promise a date you can beat. Put it in your contract, repeat it in your final email on the day, and update the couple if anything changes.
How to set expectations
- Give a range, not a number. “Usually 500 to 700 edited photos for a full day” leaves room for the wedding you actually get.
- Put the delivery date in writing, in your contract and in your post-wedding email.
- Explain what’s edited. Every delivered photo should be colour-corrected. Say how many get detailed retouching, and how album or retouching picks work.
- Say how long the gallery is online, and remind the couple to download everything before it closes.
Delivering a big wedding gallery
Hundreds of full-resolution photos don’t fit in an email and quickly outgrow free transfer links. A client gallery lets the couple browse on their phone, share with family, choose album favourites and download everything as a ZIP. SendShoot holds up to 3,000 photos per shoot on the Business plan, and the free plan is enough to try it with a real wedding of up to 300 photos. See how it works for wedding photographers.
