Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Wedding Albums

The digital wedding album is one of the best examples of how digital photography has revolutionised wedding photography. So much more can now be achieved than when using film. But there are advantages and disadvantages with digital albums, which we'll have a look at now.

Advantages

With traditional wedding albums you'd normally have to choose 40 or 60 photos to go in it. But these days most photographers easily take 1000 photos or more at a wedding.

So whereas you would've had to leave out a lot of photos, now you easily include several hundred photos in your wedding album.

Wedding photographers either design their own album layouts with specialist software, or use some form of design service. This may be an independent business or an extra service provided by an album manufacturer.

So now you can have more photos in your album, you don't have to agonise over which to leave out, and you'll most likely get a much more creative album. For example, photos can be different sizes and placed anywhere on the page, rather than being one size, one photo to a page.

Some people achieve some pretty amazing results within their album planning software, for example by adding graphics, border effects or text. Again, all this contributes to a custom-made, individual and personal wedding album you'll treasure forever.

Digital wedding albums are often called 'coffee table books', 'storybooks' or magazine-style wedding albums'. But there are subtle differences between those phrases, usually to do with 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 for you to buy. Most photographers include a set number of photos for your album in their upfront fee, but you may well want more in your album.

Album planning is another new task for photographers that arrived with digital (on top of photo-editing). As this takes extra time, photographer's fees have to 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 computer work).

To summarise, 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're still a fairly high-end product.