The weeks and the year after the wedding
The wedding ends and the admin starts. Dresses to clean, suits to return, a gallery link in your inbox, a pile of cards on the kitchen table and a list of people you owe a thank you. None of it is urgent, which is exactly why it sits there for months.
The order below is the one that causes the least regret. The things with a deadline come first, and the things that get better with time come last.
Collect everything before anything expires
Links die. Galleries come with a window, shared folders get cleaned out, and the friend who said they would send their photos will send them in the first fortnight or never. Do the gathering while people still have the wedding in mind.
Download the professional gallery at full resolution as soon as it arrives, even if you have no idea yet what you want to print. Put a copy somewhere that is not the phone you carry around.
If guests sent photos to a shared album, download that in original quality too. WedKeeps keeps the files for twelve months, and the administrators can view, organise and download everything in that time, which is long enough if you do it and short enough to matter if you do not.
Thank you notes
The reason thank you notes get delayed is that couples try to write them all in one sitting and run out of things to say by the fifth. Write a handful at a time and the quality holds.
Three things make a note read as written rather than copied: name the gift or what the person did, say something only you would know about having them there, and say what you are doing next. A sentence about them travelling for it, or about the thing they said during the speeches, does more than a paragraph of formal phrasing.
For guests who gave money, say what it is going toward. It is the easiest specific detail available to you, and people like knowing.
There is no deadline that anyone enforces, but notes sent within a couple of months land while the day is still shared memory. Keep a list of who sent what as it arrives, because reconstructing it from a pile of cards in March is miserable.
Making the album
An album is a selection, and the selection is the hard part. Going through a thousand images looking for the good ones does not work. Going through them once and marking anything that makes you feel something, then cutting from there, does.
Mix the sets. A spread of formal portraits is a record. The same spread with a guest's photo of the same moment from the other side of the room is a story, and guest photos are usually where the album gets its laughs.
Print something small early even if the big album takes a year. A handful of prints on a shelf gets looked at. A file in a folder does not.
The first anniversary
The traditional gift for the first anniversary is paper, which suits the year better than it sounds. A printed book of the photos, a framed print, a letter written on the day you were married and read a year later. Paper is the one material that holds the thing you want to give, which is a record of the year you just had.
It is also the date couples set for anything they sealed at the wedding. In WedKeeps the video messages guests recorded stay closed until a year after the wedding, so the capsule opens around the anniversary and you hear people saying what they thought at the time rather than what they remember now.
Put the date in a calendar before you forget. The first anniversary arrives faster than the planning did.