There are many reasons for the workflow
There are many reasons for the workflow, but they center around album sales. My clients average $6-10k in album purchases on top of my shooting fees. By only giving them a small taste of their images (the Facebook post), when they see their album draft a few days after the wedding, they’re blown away!
I choose my favorite images and design a spectacular book
I choose my favorite images and design a spectacular book. If you let your client choose the images, they typically take a long time and often pick mediocre shots because they’re inexperienced and choosing for political/family reasons—not for aesthetics. In my opinion, it’s a burden on your client to force them to choose their favorites for the album. They’ve put enough effort into making decisions for the wedding. As professionals, we should help and guide them—not drop more work in their laps!
It’s easier to edit a designed album than it is to start from scratch. By enabling clients to view their album early, they’re still emotionally engaged with their images. While the rest of the images are uploading to an online service to display photos and sell prints, your clients watch the album slideshow again and again, imagining it as their book more and more. By the time other images are ready to review, the clients are ready to make a few changes, but it’s tough to cut the album down any significant amount.
Customers all know what’s possible; they know how fast things can turn around
Customers all know what’s possible; they know how fast things can turn around. They want images on their phones and on Facebook sooner rather than later. Uncle Bob is at their wedding, and he’s shooting photos with his phone or his Rebel XTI and posting them on Facebook the same day. By the time you play around with your images, add your special sauce, make the white balance perfect in every photo, run noise filters, sharpen edges, and so on, your photos become irrelevant. You can post them to Facebook, but people are like, “Oh yeah, I remember that. Already saw it.”
high-quality images
The bride prefers high-quality images, but she’ll take whatever is first. The streams of Twitter and Facebook are living things, and whatever is NOW is what matters most. Posting images a few weeks later is far less important, impacting or valuable. Since Facebook is becoming the operating system of the web, I believe our businesses need simple, direct tie-ins. For example, I post slideshows directly onto my Facebook wall using SWAT. My goal is to make it simple for clients to post images on Facebook that are automatically tagged to me and my sites. This extra marketing results in additional bookings. I’d never suggest giving your clients mediocre work; the trick is learning how to produce excellent work quickly.