The Photographer Owns Your Wedding Photos — the Album Is the Sales Pitch

"Album included" reads like a gift. Inside a wedding-photography contract it is a line item, and it sits next to the clause almost no couple checks: who owns the pictures. Under U.S. law, the photographer does. The author and initial owner of a photograph is the person who takes it, and that is true from the moment the picture is taken — registration is voluntary and payment changes nothing. 1 There is one exception, "work made for hire", which puts the copyright with the party who commissioned the work. It covers an employee's work and a short list of nine categories a client may commission by express written agreement, and a wedding shoot is on none of them. 2

What a couple buys instead is a licence. The usual one is called a print release, and it is narrower than the word "yours" suggests: it covers printing and personal sharing, and withholds selling, submitting the pictures for publication, and in most versions editing them. The photographer keeps the copyright, and with it the right to keep using the pictures for their own marketing and branding. 3 Actually owning the copyright is a separate purchase. One couple writing to A Practical Wedding was quoted $2,000 more for it, and the price held even after they offered to leave the photographer as the owner and change only the model release, so she would have to ask before using their photos elsewhere. 4

The album is doing a specific job in that package, and the trade says so out loud. Album manufacturers coach photographers to bundle it, on the reasoning that "when couples see an album included in a package, it allows them to envision the complete story of their wedding day and increases the chances of them wanting their day captured and preserved beautifully in an album", and that bundling it "can also increase the value of your photography services". The guidance is to take the album deposit before the wedding, while couples are still "in an excited frame of mind and are handing out deposits left, right and centre". 5

All of it is written down before anyone signs, which is the useful part. The number on a photography quote is the price of permission, and permission is a clause a couple can ask about by name — the print release, what it withholds, and who ends up holding the copyright — while there is still time to change it.