You wait eight weeks for your wedding photos. What do you have that evening?

How long does it really take?

Read a few Dutch wedding photographers on their own sites and a clear picture comes out of it. Tessa Bruggink works to eight to ten weeks. RUUDC Fotografie names six to ten weeks as a guideline. Fotografeelgood delivers the complete set within four to six weeks, Fousert Fotografie does its best to deliver inside five weeks, and I Shoot Love also works to four to six weeks.

So count on four to ten weeks, and on the top of that range if you have booked somebody who edits every photo by hand. Marry in high season and you are standing in a queue as well: in September alone, more than a quarter of all Dutch weddings take place. A photographer who tells you in October that it will take ten weeks is simply telling you what their diary looks like.

Why does a good photographer need those weeks?

Because between the last photo of the evening and your gallery there are five things, and not one of them can go faster.

What helps to understand it: the work is not in taking the photos, that was Saturday. The work is in leaving things out. Of two to three thousand frames, three to six hundred are left, and which ones those are is exactly what you paid for. A photographer who sent you everything could deliver tomorrow, and then you would have a folder you never get through.

1. Taking it in and making it safe. Every file from the day goes in first and is backed up several times before anything else happens.
2. First pass. Anything where somebody has their eyes shut, where the focus sits just wrong, or where three near-identical frames stand next to each other, goes out.
3. Second pass. Of what is left, every photo still has to add something to the story of the day. This is the round that takes longest.
4. Editing, photo by photo. Colour, light and contrast are set frame by frame, so the church at two and the dance floor at one look like they come from the same day. At five hundred photos that is not a button but a week.
5. Getting it ready. Exporting at the right size, setting up a gallery and making the download files.

So what do you have in those weeks?

Two things. The first comes from your photographer: almost all of them send a small selection ahead within a few days. Fousert Fotografie does that within a few days, Fotografeelgood sends a sneak preview within a few days, I Shoot Love talks about a teaser within a week. That is ten to twenty photos, and they exist for precisely this reason: to get you through the first weeks.

The second comes from your guests, and that is the pile almost nobody talks about. There were eighty phones in the room that evening. If those photos arrive somewhere instead of staying put in eighty camera rolls, you can look back on Sunday morning at what happened at half past one. Not because it is better than what your photographer makes, but because it is here now.

And there is something on top of that which you only notice once you live through it. Everybody messages you the week after: "so, any photos yet?". If you can send one link back to that, you are not explaining for eight weeks that it is still coming. How you fill that link is in the guide to collecting photos at your wedding.

Are guest photos a replacement for your photographer?

No, and that is not politeness. They are two different things you want both of, and they are not interchangeable.

From your photographer you get three to six hundred photos that are good. Well lit, made at the right moment, with colour that holds across the whole day. You hang one of those on the wall, and in twenty years those are the photos you show your children.

From your guests you get a few hundred photos that exist. They sit crooked, there is flash where there should not be, and a quarter of them have somebody's thumb in them. But they come from nine tables at once, from the corridor by the toilets, from the smoking spot outside and from quarter past two, when your photographer had long gone home. Those photos have your mother's face during the speech, seen from the place your photographer was not standing, because they were on the other side watching your father.

Neither of the two replaces the other. Cutting back on the photographer because your guests have phones is the same as cancelling the cook because there is a microwave.

Can you put the photographer's set and the guest photos together?

You can, and it makes a nice moment if you save it up. Some couples make two albums: one with their guests' photos that opens straight away, and one that stays closed until the set is in. The moment your photographer delivers after eight weeks you open that second album, and your guests hear about your day one more time, at a moment they were not expecting it. How a closed album works is in the guide on keeping the album closed.

Do ask first. The copyright on those photos stays with your photographer, even now that you have paid for the set. In practice almost everybody is fine with their work sitting in your own album, certainly if their name can go with it and nobody edits over the top of it. It is one email, and it saves an awkward conversation.