What happens when your photographer's gallery expires

Why they expire at all

It is not a trick. A photographer shooting thirty weddings a year is storing several terabytes of other people's photographs, and that costs money every month for as long as it sits there. Somewhere between three months and a year is the normal answer, and it is a reasonable one.

The problem is not the policy. It is that most couples find out about it afterwards. The gallery arrives, everyone looks at it, life resumes, and eighteen months later somebody clicks the link in an old email and it does not work.

What actually happens when it goes

The link stops working and the photos come down with it. Some photographers email a warning first, some do not, and an email sent to the address you used while planning a wedding is not guaranteed to be an address you still read.

Most will put the set back up if you ask, and many charge for it, because it means retrieving your wedding from an archive drive. Some will not have it at all — a photographer who has changed business, retired or had a drive fail is under no obligation to have kept your files for ever, and some contracts say so explicitly.

So the sentence worth internalising is this one: the photographer delivered your photos to you. They are yours now, and keeping them is your job.

What to do the week yours arrives

This takes an evening, and it is the single most useful evening you will spend on your wedding photos.

1. Download everything, at full resolution. Galleries often offer a smaller “web” or “sharing” size alongside the originals. Take the originals, even though they are bigger.
2. Check what you got. Count the files against what your photographer said they delivered, and open a few. A download that quietly stopped halfway is common and easy to miss.
3. Get them off your Downloads folder. A ZIP sitting on a laptop is not a copy of your wedding. It is a copy of your wedding until that laptop is dropped, stolen or wiped.
4. Put them in two places, one of which is not your laptop. An external drive and a paid cloud backup, or two drives kept in different buildings. Two copies in the same house is one accident away from none.
5. Then decide where to share from. Which is a different question, and the subject of another guide.

What to ask before you book

If you are reading this while still choosing a photographer, these are worth asking, and any good one will answer them without hesitating:

• How long will the gallery stay up?
• Will you tell me before it comes down?
• Can I download the full-resolution originals, or only a smaller version?
• If I come back in three years, will you still have my photos, and what would it cost?
• Am I allowed to print them and share them myself?

None of these are awkward questions. They are the same questions a photographer would ask about their own work.

Sharing is not keeping

The two jobs get confused because one link seems to do both. It does not. Somewhere you share from is built to be opened by thirty people on their phones; somewhere you keep things is built so that the originals survive a decade of house moves and dead laptops.

A gallery of your own — ours or anyone else's — is a good answer to the first. It is not an answer to the second, and any service that tells you otherwise is asking you to trust that it will outlive your marriage. Keep your own copy of the originals regardless of what you share from.