Married ladies: How much did you spend on wedding album?

kayladee87 · May 2011

I received an email from my wedding photographer saying she had our wedding photos made into an album for viewing at her studio. She also mentioned she can get another one for me. Originally, it would be $1000, but she can get the cost down to $700. Is this ridiculous or am I cheap? If you purchased one, how much did you spend?

opalsky007 · May 2011

I received the rights to our photos and made photobooks on shutterfly for about $30 apiece. However, I spent a LOT of time on it and still wasn't thrilled with the results. I'd expect to pay big bucks to have it done professionally.

baystateapple · May 2011

Our photography package was a CD with all the prints on it. H and I made our own album through Shutterfly, used coupons, and got the whole thing for $55.

NcsuPsych · May 2011

I dont think you're cheap. Thats a lot of money and at that cost, I would rather make my own.

With that said, my MOH made scrapbooks for us as our wedding gift. They have a good majority of the pictures from the weddnig and I wouldn't trade them for the world. I have no idea how much they cost to make though.

I'm relatively budget friendly (or cheap, whichever way you'd like to refer to it) and I could never spend that kind of money on something, when I could make it on my own. But, that's just me.

[Deleted User] · May 2011

I wish I could answer your question, but we haven't ordered one yet.

But I think a lot of ladies on here have made one themselves using blurb.com or similar sites.

kayladee87 · May 2011

I also have the rights to our photos. I was thinking about Shutterfly which is what I used for a small album of our engagement photos. It was nice, but not overly awesome.

emilyinchile · May 2011

Professional albums are insanely expensive. My photographer is one of my best friends, and my album was the first one she designed, so she charged me almost nothing for her labor, and it was still several hundred dollars.

$700 for a pro album is a decent price. The real question is whether you want a professional album - with thicker pages and nicer cover - and/or a professional design - whether due to not wanting to spend the time or not feeling that creative - or whether you're happy to DIY with blurb or a similar service and save money.

number55 · May 2011

I made ours on Picaboo for $185...I got it for less after a discount. It was worth what I paid. I don't know what I would have gotten for a 1k from my photographer but it wouldn't have been worth it for me. I also wanted to control what went in, what went where, the whole design, and I was able to put in some non-pro pics that were okay.

aleighk1 · May 2011

I'm not married yet but I won't be getting an album from my photographer (we got a simple package with just coverage and a CD). I just looked it up and she does albums for $400 and that's 40 pages of pictures, but she is the cheapest photographer I found with really good pictures.

K Byte · May 2011

Albums are expensive. Ours was included with our wedding package but I think our photogs charge $500 and up if you want extra albums, depending on how many pages are in the album and what the cover looks like. I don't think $750 is that unreasonable, but find out what you get for that $750 before you decide if you want a professional album or just want to DIY one.

specialk84 · May 2011

Obviously, I'm not a married lady yet, but FI and I have already picked out an album style we like.

Our photographer doesn't charge by the hour. There are no packages, but there is a minimum order. To reach that minimum price, we can buy an album, buy mini-albums for parents and grandparents, buy prints, buy the rights, etc. Others can order prints or albums, too, and their purchases count toward our minimum. It just so happens that the album price (for the style we want--there are plenty of others, too) is equal to the minimum.

kayladee87 · May 2011

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-boards_etiquette_married-ladies-much-did-spend-wedding-albums?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Wedding%20BoardsForum:9Discussion:d07ab2bc-36ee-4ae7-a9a0-a50cf04eb4ecPost:04cce4a3-cc90-46d8-aa0d-a65655328c7a">Re: Married ladies: How much did you spend on wedding album?</a>:
[QUOTE]Albums are expensive. Ours was included with our wedding package but I think our photogs charge $500 and up if you want extra albums, depending on how many pages are in the album and what the cover looks like. I don't think $750 is that unreasonable, but find out what you get for that $750 before you decide if you want a professional album or just want to DIY one.
Posted by K Byte[/QUOTE]

<div>She's sent me the PDF of the layout which looks really great. My husband is going down to the the city she lives in next week, so I think he's going to stop by and see the actual album. </div>

MrsLibrarian · May 2011

I made our own album as well. I used blurb.com and I was really happy with the results. They have a professional paper that you can use and can do a high quality book for a make-your-own I think. It cost me I think about $50 or so per album. That being said, it's still not the quality of a professional album. It all depends on what you want out of your album.

FutureMrsFezz · May 2011

Our photographer's albums were expensive $300-700. I spent $80 on snapfish and made a book. It's awesome.

hlq2011 · May 2011

I'm not married yet, but we will probably do our album through the photographer. I just don't have an eye for that stuff, and she did a great job with our guest book e-pic album, so I'm going to run with that. And I think her pricing is higher than $700. For a pro album, I think that's reasonable. It becomes a question fo whether you want to do it yourself, or pay to have someone else.

[Deleted User] · May 2011

I don't think we ever got one.

GeauxTigers17 · May 2011

I think it sounds reasonable for a pro. Our album is "included" in our package, but his cheapest stand-alone is a mini album of 30 photos for $400.

breaness · May 2011

I'm not married yet, and our wedding album is included in our package so I don't know what she'd charge... but I am a professional photographer myself.

To order a nicely printed and bound, lay flat, professional looking album it costs us (photographers) $250 or more. Then add in the time it takes designing the pages and doing revisions and I think the price is fair.

TurtlesAllTheWayDown · May 2011

I'm PLANNING on making my own leather-bound album for about $300-$400. If you buy it from a photographer, I would expect it to be $700-$1000.

scottswife1106 · May 2011

Ours is going to be $700. I hate that our company is making us purchase one but that's what I get for thinking one thing and there being a clause in our contract, that said something different.

lbow1984 · May 2011

I'm not married yet, but we are just receiving the rights to our photos and I will be creating the album myself. I know it won't be the quality of a $700 album, but I'm quite creative and as far as layout I prefer to do it myself.

Loopyseven · May 2011

Our photography package included a disc of the photos with rights to print them and I made my own book on Shutterfly for less than $50. It worked well, I liked the layouts they had and it fit the budget I was willing to spend for a photo book that will sit on a coffee table for a year or two and then be relegated to a shelf full of photo albums to be looked at maybe once a year, if that for the rest of eternity LOL.

hz80408 · May 2011

Our photog offered one for $1K, but we still would have had to go through our pics for him to make it.

I bought a $35 picaboo Groupon (for $100 credit) and have spent at least 15 hours making ours. It's at about 80 pages, it's 11"x14", and final price will be about $80.

However, it is almost 7 months past the wedding and I still haven't ordered it, so if you're a procrastinor and/or don't have the patience to design/tweak yourself, you may think it's worth it? If I had the choice again, I'd still DIY it.

noodle_oo · May 2011

We did a package in advance that locked in our album price at about $1000. I thought we'd really want it when we did it but when it came to order it, I wasn't sure about spending all that money. But it was in our contract, so we did it. We just got our album and I was blown away by how beautiful it came out! The professional albums really are a beautiful, lasting quality far better than anything you can make yourself online (seriously, I've made books on Shutterfly, Blurb and Picaboo and the quality is no where near the same). Plus our photographer retouched all our photos (so we look *amazing*) and the layouts are beautiful. As I said I"ve made albums before and it takes a LOT of time and we had over 1200 photos. It would have been a huge effort for me to make it myself and I'm not sure I would have ever raelly gotten around to it. So even though it was a ton of money, I'm glad we did it.

Honestly, $700 is a good price. If you can afford it, I'd do it. And you can take a look at her sample, so you can actually see it and decide if you think it is worth it.

We have all our images on CD as well and I plan to make some more albums (small ones for our parents and then one with more photos of our friends, kind of like a scrapbook). But I'm still glad we bought the album. But we're also super sentimental. My sister didn't get any album from her wedding, but she's just not the type that cares about having one.

Karen's MOH · May 2011

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-boards_etiquette_married-ladies-much-did-spend-wedding-albums?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Wedding BoardsForum:9Discussion:d07ab2bc-36ee-4ae7-a9a0-a50cf04eb4ecPost:8dc10793-3e4c-4c07-bd7a-15470edf7c4e">Re: Married ladies: How much did you spend on wedding album?</a>:
[QUOTE]I made ours on Picaboo for $185...I got it for less after a discount. It was worth what I paid. I don't know what I would have gotten for a 1k from my photographer but it wouldn't have been worth it for me. I also wanted to control what went in, what went where, the whole design, and I was able to put in some non-pro pics that were okay.
Posted by number55[/QUOTE]

Same here. I ordered a cheaper "Classic" book for my parents, and am upgrading ours to one of their fancier options (Madison). With a Groupon ours will come out to a little less than what number said.

We paid extra for the CD with rights to our photos, since I knew i would want to have them anyway. We had already splurged on photography even without the albums, since I figured it was more important to me to have the best pictures, and then figure out what to do with them. We also did cheaper Shutterfly albums for my inlaws-- to me those are fine for regular photobooks, but for the album that we are keeping I wanted higher end. Picaboo is somewhere in between to me.

All that said, I think $700 is really reasonable for a professional quality album. I've spent a lot of time working on the layouts in mine, and I still look at pro ones and covet some of the layouts they come up with.

thesuninherhead · May 2011

Our package included an album with a certain amount of spreads and certain $ value. We added an additional $800 to get all of the pages we wanted... which is a lot of money, yeah, but it is a beautiful, good quality book (although, I guess for that price you'd want it to be! haha). I don't regret spending the extra, though.

http://jonaspeterson.com/wedding/nick-mel-wedding-album/

jtmh2012 · May 2011

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-boards_etiquette_married-ladies-much-did-spend-wedding-albums?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Wedding%20BoardsForum:9Discussion:d07ab2bc-36ee-4ae7-a9a0-a50cf04eb4ecPost:697bae35-ff9e-4c27-8d74-b2beab53b39d">Re: Married ladies: How much did you spend on wedding album?</a>:
[QUOTE]I'm PLANNING on making my own leather-bound album for about $300-$400. If you buy it from a photographer, I would expect it to be $700-$1000.
Posted by msmerymac[/QUOTE]

Where are you planning to get yours from?

Calypso1977 · May 2011

my photographer wanted about $800. i said no way.

we had all rights to the photos and got a CD. so, i printed out every single shot at walgreens, weeded out the 20 or so that were bad, and then purchased a photo album. total cost was about $100.

the flushmounts are certainly beautiful, but that kind of money jsut seemed excessive. it was more than we even spent on the photographer!

mica178 · May 2011

I made ours, both a scrapbook and a Shutterfly one. I thought about doing it on mpix instead, but I found the quality of the albums I made for our parents on Shutterfly to be more than adequate.

(My photographer showed me pictures of the albums he made, and I didn't love the quality of the paper enough to justify $500 per.)

iamjoesgurl · May 2011

We got the rights to our pictures and I went through Adorama for our album. It has about 70 pages and was completely customizable. I was able to do all of the layouts myself and make it the way I wanted it. It was around $150 and although I spent a lot of time making it, I absolutely love it (and most people that have seen it have thought it was done professionally - Adorama just does such a great job).

I picked Adorama because they offered lay flat pages, the pages are thicker than card stock (and are archival photo paper) and were highly rated by this review:

http://tinyurl.com/y8kjs38

If you get a book through a photographer, you can expect to pay much more. If someone else had spent all of the time that I did doing the layout and creating the book, it probably wouldn't be hard to believe that it cost $700 or more. If you can, do it yourself.

Married ladies: How much did you spend on wedding album?

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