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Are You Offering Your Brides This Service?
Uncle Bob brought his high-end digital camera to the wedding and shot dozens of photos. The bride gets a DVD of images a week later, and really likes some of the shots. Perhaps she’ll upload them to Flickr to share with her friends or Shutterfly to make some prints. But most likely, she’ll throw the DVD in a drawer and save it for a rainy day project – along with all the other images she received from wedding guests.
Could this be an income opportunity for a professional photographer? What if you offered as part of your package a central place for brides to have guests to upload their photographs, then you downloaded the images and designed and printed a 2nd album for the bride?
There are literally dozens of photo sharing sites available, but each one has strengths and weaknesses. Photo sharing sites like Flickr are free, but they don’t have the tools necessary to make it easy to create a wedding-specific site. As a professional, you’d want to offer:
• Password protected wedding with Personalized URL
• Doesn’t require guests to register
• Bulk upload tool
• Download of original full-res files
• Email guest list with reminders
Pro photo-sharing websites like TheWeddingLens.com offer all these features, but they aren’t free. and the pro versions of Shutterfly, SmugMug or ImageQuix let you sell photos online, but don’t give you an easy way for guests to upload their photos.
So here’s a question for you: Do you already offer brides this service? Would you consider making an album from someone else’s images? Do you think you could make any money at it?
Please share your comments below.
Tags: sales
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AlliedMedia.net
May 4th, 2012 at 9:09 am
I like it.
May 4th, 2012 at 9:31 am
This sounds good on paper but could easily turn into a “cluster” when one considers the copyright implications. And wading thru tons of crap images to find a few “album worthy” ones is more of a time investment than most shooters I know might want to make. Like it or not, your name will be associated with the final product. And when people see what they peceive to be your “minimum quality standard for what can go into an album”, then the logical question will be, “Why should we hire you if all these other people’s work is ‘acceptable’ in your eyes”?
The likely overall ROI and potential for “backfire” just doesn’t make this seem very appealing. YMMV.
May 4th, 2012 at 12:22 pm
John, I think copyright is a non-issue. You can take care of that with a sentence on the upload page or a table card that read “by uploading images, you are giving permission to XYZ Studio to make prints or products for the bridal couple. You will not receive any royalties or payment for your images.”
You could manage the quality issue by making it clear that the album uses guest images, not yours. Or you can make the second album a coffee table book to differentiate it from the “real” album. You’re offering a new service, not photography.
It seems to me that if it were successfully implemented, sifting through a thousand extra images is the real problem. Without trying it once, my guess is it would cost you at least as much to produce in the studio as the “real” album.
May 6th, 2012 at 9:32 am
Have the bride & groom select the images…just hope all the images have different jpg numbers!