Advantages and disadvantages of digital wedding albums
The digital wedding album is one of the best examples of how digital photography has revolutionized wedding photography. Much more can now be achieved than when using film. But there are pros and cons with digital albums, which we’ll take a look at now.
Advantage
With traditional wedding albums, you would typically have to choose 40 or 60 photos to include. But these days, most photographers easily take 1,000 photos or more at a wedding.
So while you would have had to omit a lot of photos, now you can easily include several hundred photos in your wedding album.
Wedding photographers design their own album layouts using specialized software or use some type of design service. This may be an independent business or an additional service provided by an album maker.
So now you can have more photos in your album, you don’t have to worry about which ones to skip, and you will most likely end up with a much more creative album. For example, photos can be of different sizes and placed anywhere on the page, instead of being one size, one photo per page.
Some people get amazing results within their album planning software, for example by adding graphics, border effects, or text. Once again, all of this adds up to a personalized, individual and personal wedding album that you will treasure forever.
Digital wedding albums are often referred to as “coffee table books,” “story books,” or magazine-style wedding albums. But there are subtle differences between those phrases, usually related to how the album is made, the type of paper used for the pages, and how it’s designed.
Disadvantages
More photos in your album means more photos to buy. Most photographers include a set number of photos for their album in their initial fee, but you may want more in your album.
Album planning is another new task for photographers who came with digital (besides photo editing). As this takes more time, the photographer’s fee should reflect this.
(There’s also the opportunity cost, i.e. instead of being able to shoot portraits during the week, a wedding photographer now has to do all this extra work on the computer.)
In short, a digital wedding album gives you a much more contemporary and creative album than you would have had before digital technology. But as a result of the extra time and skill involved in producing them, they are still a pretty sophisticated product.