WedPics

A tip we picked up online from someone else (sorry, whoever you are; it's been so long ago that I've forgotten!) for our wedding is to take advantage of the fact that many, if not most, of our guests are going to have smart phones with them. Since we have two families spending almost a week in Disney World, sometimes together and sometimes apart, there's a lot to chronicle and keep as memories, and we only have a photographer for about three hours on our wedding day. Fortunately, phones with cameras and Internet access are ubiquitous among our guests, so we're going to ask all of our guests to get those phones out and snap lots of photos over the course of the week that we're there. Instead of having one photographer, we'll have 12 or so, taking photos of all of the pre- and post-wedding events and hopefully capturing some great, candid shots.

We're transforming our wedding guests into our personal paparazzi.

Of course, having a dozen people snapping photos during the trip doesn't do us any good if we don't have some way to aggregate them. Some websites recommend setting up a single repository on Photobucket or Flickr to which people can upload theses photos. However, I found setting those up to allow multiple people to upload to them to be a bit of a chore, so I started doing some research on dedicated apps for just this kind of event-based image collation. The one I ended up settling on was WedPics, for a number of reasons. First, it's free, which is a big boon. Second, it has apps native to both iOS and Android, which means that basically anyone in our family with a smartphone will be able to upload and view the photos for the trip. Lastly, the interface is easy, and you create a special wedding identifier that your family can use to connect their apps to your albums, automatically uploading everything to the right place. I think Girl Scout Fiancéeis also going to like the fact that the app can apply Instagram-like filters to the images before uploading them.

Man, they can do anything with filters these days.

I really hope it's going to work out; if it does, we'll have a lot of great photos from the trip. The biggest hurdle is going to be getting our families to remember to take the photos in the first place, and then to upload their pictures to the WedPics albums. We've put information about our WedPics album into our welcome brochures (which I'll talk about in a future blog post), so hopefully everyone will embrace this so we can come home with some great visual memories of the entire week.