Understanding the differences between wedding albums, different qualities and sizes and more importantly, how many photographs they can contain can be very difficult.
Wedding albums come in many different sizes with different page and image numbers. On average, a wedding album has between 20-40 pages, with 2-5 photographs per page.
Some photographers base the price of their wedding album on the number of spreads the album has. Other photographers count the number of pages, others base the price on the number of images in the album. All of this can make things very difficult to compare between different packages and album types.
What does “spread” mean in a wedding album?
A spread is basically 2 pages beside each other as you open the album. So a spread consists of 2 pages. Have a look at this example. Here, each pages contains 2 images. But the spread contains 4 images.
A full-day wedding can show the story of the wedding day in approximately 80-100 photographs. But you need to be ruthless in selecting the photos. If you want more, expect the album price to increase.
Depending on the album supplier your photographer works with, the increase in price can be as little as £100 for additional 25 images, or they could have an image price of say £30 per photograph. This would mean every 10 photographs you add, you would pay an additional £300 on top of the base price of the album.
Is the number of spreads or pages limited?
Short answer: Yes. There are different album companies out there and their albums can have a certain number of spreads which cannot be extended. This is to do with the machinery they use to produce the album and also if you can actually handle an album with 100 thick pages, as this would be 5 inches thick…!
Who makes the best wedding albums?
Album companies to check out.
- Dreambooks Pro, Portugal
- Loxley Colour, UK
- Jorgensen, UK
- Queensberry Albums, New Zealand
- GraphiStudio, Italy
Example wedding album: 96 images (50 pages, i.e. 25 spreads)
