Does delivering fast devalue what we do?: Dear Devlin
DEAR DEVLIN
If the industry says slow down and make people wait for their wedding images, is it bad to deliver in a week?
Dear Devlin,
I’ve been listening to your obsessed podcast eps and you’ve mentioned a couple of times you’re a fast editor. Me too. I often wonder what people are doing and my weddings are mostly finished at least a week after I’ve attended them. Unless video is involved in which case the struggle is real.
There’s a lot of noise in the industry internet at the moment about people being told to slow down/not deliver sneak peeks/make people wait etc. Whilst simultaneously living in a universe where super speedy service is rewarded.
I seemed to have settled into a rhythm of editing within a week then sitting on it for 3 weeks until delivery around 4 weeks. But should I do this? Is there shame in delivering a week after? Does it devalue what we do or is that something I made up in my head?
From fast and frustrated
“Nobody Has Ever Complained About Getting Their Wedding Photos Early.”
Dear Fast and Frustrated,
Ha! I could have written this one myself as yes I’m a fast editor too, always have been, and understand where you are coming from as the implication can feel that this somehow makes the work less considered. It doesn’t.
Let’s clear this up first – Speed and quality aren’t opposites, sloppy and considered are opposites. You can be quick and excellent, or you can equally be slow and mediocre. The calendar tells you nothing about the work itself.
So let’s take that shame off the table first. There is nothing wrong with you finishing a wedding in a week.
Where “Make Them Wait” Advice Actually Comes From
The advice to slow down usually comes from a real problem, but it’s the wrong fix. The real problem is photographers under-delivering on expectations, promising six weeks and taking sixteen, or firing off a gorgeous sneak peek within 48 hours and then leaving the couple checking their inbox for two months.
That’s what erodes trust, the gap between what you said and what you did, not the actual number of days.
If you deliver in a week and you told them to expect four to six weeks, you haven’t devalued anything. You’ve overdelivered. Nobody has ever complained about getting their wedding photos early.
But we’ve all seen plenty of photographers stressed because their couple isn’t happy that editing is taking longer than expected.
Does making couples wait give gravitas to the service or somehow justify the cost more? Well if this was true why do some photographers offer faster edits at a premium price?
So Why Is Everyone Else Taking So Long?
If you go looking, the numbers say wedding gallery delivery ranges from 4 to 12 weeks, with 6 to 8 weeks sitting as the industry standard most photographers quote. But nobody is actually sat editing one wedding for eight weeks. Nobody’s culling and editing skills are that slow. So that timeframe isn’t describing the editing, it’s describing workflow and mindset.
I mentored a photographer a while back who was missing her delivery deadlines frequently and when I asked her to talk me through a normal working day, this is what she told me.
Wake up at 9.30am, gym, breakfast with her partner at 11.30am, sit down to emails at 1pm, open her editing software at 2pm, finish work at 6pm and cook dinner for her boyfriend. A perfectly nice day, but a part-time one.
I asked how she felt about editing itself. She told me she hated it, got distracted posting and scrolling on social media, and made almost no progress on a wedding until a couple of days before the deadline. Then the gym stopped, the leisurely brunch stopped, her boyfriend made his own dinner, and she scrambled. I also asked how it felt having galleries hang over her like that, stopping and starting for weeks on end. She hated that too, and it had led to her having to warn couples she’d be late.
We’re all wired differently, and I think a lot of this comes down to personality type rather than skill or discipline. I hate editing as well but prefer to get it over and done with as fast as I can rather than have it hanging over me.
Why I Edit Fast, And Why It’s Not Really About Speed
Editing a wedding in a day, start to finish, even without AI, means the job is done and dusted before there’s room for anything to go wrong. And I do mean anything. A computer meltdown, a hard drive failing, a memory card accidentally written over, my house burning down, yes I know these are dramatic, but that’s how I like to spend the early hours thinking through worst cases. A fast edit is more about freeing me from that worry than being some badge of honour.
I also prefer to cull and edit while the wedding is still fresh in my mind, while I can still feel the flow of the day rather than reconstructing it from memory two months later. But I know photographers who much prefer distance from it before they start.
Anyone curious can see my full workflow, cull to gallery upload, in the Barn class Edit A Wedding In A Day, culling in my pyjamas at silly o’clock included. And when I say a day, I mean a full day.
None of this is about being able to do it because I limit my bookings. I’ve always worked this way, even when I had too many weddings to manage solo, at which point I hired an editor rather than let my own rhythm slip.
If I was delivering on an 8 to 12 week cycle, I’d feel like I was juggling several weddings at once, and I’ve never been able to juggle; every ball just drops. Handling one wedding at a time, start to finish, before the next one lands, feels far more manageable for me than several balls in the air.
Editing Fast Doesn’t Mean Delivering Straight Away
If you’re wondering when I actually send the gallery, that’s usually a conversation with the couple rather than a fixed rule. I ask what suits them, and more often than not they want it fairly soon; that might be a Friday night a week or two after the wedding or when they return from honeymoon I’ll suggest they have a nice drink ready and sit together on the largest screen they’ve got for the first look. With Pic-Time it’s simple to schedule the delivery email in advance, so I’m not sat there at 7pm on a Friday hitting send.
Worth remembering too that I came to digital editing after ten years shooting only film and only delivering prints. Back then, culling was sitting with a stack of 6x4s and a bin, and any tweaks happened at the lab. If I’d started straight into digital, having a permanent editing pile might just feel like part of the job.
Ask Yourself Why You’re Editing Every Single Image So Hard
Something worth considering is that nobody is printing out all 800 or 1000 images you deliver. If a big chunk of your editing time is going into perfecting individual frames, it’s worth asking what that time is actually for. We can remove every distraction from a photo, but lately I’ve wondered whether some of them are part of the image’s charm rather than a flaw. Jessica Lily talked on our podcast recently about an image from her partner’s grandparents’ honeymoon, made better, not worse, by the ordinary people around them who’d almost certainly be cloned out today. My local town hall is covered in fussy municipal signage, and sometimes I remove it, sometimes I don’t. No client has ever mentioned it either way.
The Sweet Spot
I rarely see anyone ask couples what they’d actually prefer. My own testimonials mention how much couples loved getting their images quickly, and I think there’s real logic behind that beyond just impatience.
There’s a window after a wedding when the couple is still on a high, still centre of attention, still fielding “have you seen the photos yet” from people. Weeks later that buzz fades. It’s simple science, what goes up comes down, and a lot of couples hit a natural emotional dip once the wedding stops being the main event in their lives. Deliver your gorgeous gallery into that dip and you can land with someone who’s started dwelling more on what they didn’t love about the day than what they did. That potentially is a real issue around delivering slowly that nobody talks about.
Whatever Your Timeline, Manage It Properly
None of this means fast is the only right answer; it means the number matters less than whether you hit it. If you quote 6 to 8 weeks and deliver on the very last day, that’s a couple who spent the final fortnight refreshing their inbox with a growing sense of disappointment. I understand needing room for the unexpected, illness, school holidays, silly season, but if I quoted 6 to 8 weeks, I’d be aiming to deliver at 4, with up to 6 as my genuine buffer, not my target.
What Actually Devalues The Work
It isn’t delivery speed. It’s inconsistency, images that look unfinished, culling that’s too heavy or too light, and galleries that don’t tell a proper story of the day. Focus your energy there. A couple will eventually only remember how their gallery made them feel, not how many weeks it took to land in their inbox.
THE TAKEAWAY
Being a fast editor is an asset, not something to apologise for or worry about – Lord knows there is enough other things to stress over in this game.
The shame you’re describing isn’t coming from your couples, it’s industry noise you’ve absorbed. There is no one single way to run a wedding photography business.
We’re all wired differently, so find the rhythm that actually suits how your brain works, then set clear expectations and deliver within them or ahead of them.
Let your speed be part of what makes booking you a good decision, what gives you an edge over your rivals, because given the choice, many couples prefer the thought of getting images quicker.
PLEASE NOTE: THE IMAGES IN THIS POST DO NOT REPRESENT ANYONE MENTIONED
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