9 Great Ways to Use Photos Taken by Guests

Wedding photos are important to your special day, especially years later. While you'll likely have a professional photographer to capture all of those special moments, your guests will also take lots of pictures throughout your wedding. So, you’ll certainly want to look at ways of gathering those photos together for your use and sharing them with everyone who was in attendance and those who were unable to attend the event. 

Your guests' photographs are sure to be more informal, showing parts of your wedding day that your photographer couldn't get while they were busy grabbing gorgeous shots of you and your beloved. Indeed, guests' candid photos will often be the most interesting ones, and all of your friends and family are sure to enjoy looking through the images that catch those one-off moments. But how exactly do you make the most of the candid photos taken by the attendees at your wedding? Here are nine great tips to help you get started with ideas.

1. Share Photographs with Google Photos or Dropbox 

To make the most of the photographs that your guests take on your big day, you’ll want to share the photos with everyone in attendance and others who could not be there on the day. The simplest way is to use an online file-hosting service like Google Photos or Dropbox. You can easily share a link so everyone with photos of your wedding can share them. All in one spot, these file hosts allow guests to download and save these photos for personal use. It sounds like some extra cute photo gifts might make their way to you in the future!

2. Use a Social Media Hashtag

Wedding hashtags have been around for some time, first gaining popularity in the early days of Instagram. Using a social media hashtag for your wedding is still a fantastic way of collecting all of the candid photos your guests take from most social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook. 

By simply encouraging those in attendance to use your specific wedding hashtag when posting photos of your big day on social media sites, the images will be readily available for you and anyone else to look at after the day of the event and for years to come. 

Just make sure you display your hashtag throughout the wedding venue and on the wedding invitations so that everyone knows to use the hashtag when posting photos online. 

3. Create a Wedding Album with Capsule

The great thing about the Capsule photo app is that your wedding guests can easily add photographs and videos to your online wedding album from any device. So, even if some of your attendees don't have smartphones, they can still upload photos from their digital cameras. Furthermore, using a specific code, you can easily control access to the photos in your Capsule wedding album. Also, friends and family members who have access can easily make comments and share images. They can even order prints via the Capsule Marketplace. And if you create a wedding hashtag, as described above, authorized people can easily and quickly add photos from Instagram to your Capsule wedding album.

4. Consider Using WaldoWed

Consider using WaldoWed to make the most of the candid photos your wedding guests take. Your guests can submit selfies to WaldoWed via text or the Waldo Photos app, upload photos, and even get notified each time they appear in other guests’ photos, thanks to automated face-tagging. 

Furthermore, your professional wedding photographer can upload their highlight reel of your special day. So, you, your spouse, and the guests will be able to view both the professional shots that were taken on the day and the fun pictures the attendees took. 

The best thing about WaldoWed is that you can create multiple albums with access controls. Therefore, you could create one album that you share with your traditional-minded family members and another for your close friends that shows the wild shenanigans that went on at the end of the night, for example. 

5. Create a Photo Collage

Your gorgeous wedding portraits are sure to make for wonderful decorations around your house; you will also love having more candid images of your wedding day on your walls at home. So, consider making a photo collage that you can frame and hang in the right spot. 

Creating a collage is a fantastic way of showcasing all the elements of your wedding day, including the people closest to you. The good news is that it's easy to make a wedding photo collage. You don’t have to have any artistic skills to create wonderful-looking designs. Use a free online photo editor like BeFunky. 

In addition to BeFunky’s Collage Maker, you can use a variety of the platform’s editing tools to make your wedding photos stand out. For example, you could crop images, resize images, retouch images, remove backgrounds, adjust the exposure, add text, or even apply fun effects to make photos look like cartoons or watercolor paintings.

6. Turn Photos into Canvas Prints

Whether you make a collage or not, many of your wedding attendees’ photographs are sure to look great on the walls of your home. But you’re not limited to framing the photographs. You also have the option to print the images onto canvases. 

Canvas prints featuring your wedding shots can make excellent additions to your home. Plenty of online services enable you to quickly and easily upload images that can then be turned into canvases that are mailed directly to you. Furthermore, canvas prints are very affordable.

7. Print Photos and Make Mini Albums 

While there are various ways in which you and your wedding guests can upload and share photos of the big day online, there’s nothing like having tangible photos to handle physically. So, it’s a good idea to print out your favorite images once you have access to your guests’ different photographs. You can then place the best photos in a wedding photo album that you can keep for years to come and look back on with your spouse as you grow old together. 

Creating mini photo albums to send to everyone who attended your wedding is also a good idea. A mini album containing candid photos taken by your guests, combined with some of the professional shots your wedding photographer took, is a great keepsake gift to send to your friends and family members as a thank you. You could even change the photos you include in different albums to suit your recipient. Parent albums, thank you albums for your wedding party - the sky is the limit!

8. Download the WedSocial App

Use the WedSocial app and share it with your attendees before the wedding. You can ensure everyone knows all the details they need about the event, such as providing directions to the wedding and details about local accommodation. But you can also use the WedSocial app after the wedding to encourage your guests to upload and share their photos. 

WedSocial can be your wedding website and your photo album in one. You'll have the opportunity to tailor it to your needs. For instance, you could include a bio about you and your spouse. 

9. Think Outside the Box

You can do all sorts of things with images, so look at other ways to utilize your attendees' candid wedding photographs. For instance, you could print a photo of you and your spouse onto T-shirts and even wear them once a year on your anniversary! 

Alternatively, you could use informal wedding photos to create calendars, mugs, ornaments, and other things. You can print photographs onto many different items, so consider what items you want to print your guests’ candid photographs onto and create a heartfelt gift they'll enjoy for years.

Who knew there were many ways to make the most out of the informal wedding photographs your guests take on your special day? Whether you choose one or several of the above options, you can show off the pictures that capture your wedding day, even those of your cherished guests. As with the other elements of your wedding, plan how to make the most of your guests’ wedding photos early on. You can then set up things like social media wedding hashtags well in advance of the big day. With all the planning out of the way, you can focus on the excitement of marrying your partner. 

GUEST POST CONTRIBUTOR: NADINE WESTWOOD | NOMADICNADINE.COM