Guide | How to structure your Wedding Album & what photo sizes to print.

You'll have hundreds of wedding photos come through in your gallery. It's exhilarating and overwhelming all at the same time. This guide maps out how to narrow it down, how to structure your album, what else is worth putting in and the right size photos to print.

Page one. Your favourite photo, alone.

The first page does the most work. The album takes its tone from whatever you put here.

One photo. Printed in portrait at 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm, as pictured above). Given a page to itself. 

This is the portrait that made you jump when you opened the gallery. The first photo you sent to your partner after opening said gallery, and the first one on your Instagram carousel. Whichever one of those is yours, that's page one.

5 x 7 is the hero size. You'll only use this size five or six times scattered through the whole album. Don't make every page a hero. If every page is a hero, none of them are. 

The lead-up. Save the date, the invite, the small things.

After the first hero image, give the album a page or two for the run-up.

Save the date. The invitation. The menu, if you printed one. A pressed flower from your bouquet. Whatever paper bits of the day you couldn't throw away.

These don't need to be photos. They are the artefacts. The DOSSI album is built to hold them, slipped into the same archival inserts that won't yellow them over time.

If you want a photo on these pages too, a cute Polaroid format is what fits (If you have them). Standard Polaroids sit nicely beside an invitation or a dried flower. Two of them on a page. The white border of a Polaroid gives classic nostalgia and does half the design work for you.

If you didn't have a Polaroid camera on the day and now wish you did... you're in luck. Most labs will print any digital photo at Polaroid size with the border. I printed mine here.

The day, in sequence.

The day itself, photo after photo, in the order it happened. This is most of the album.

Print these landscape at 4 x 6 inches (10.2 x 15.2 cm, as pictured above). It's the workhorse. Two on a page (both landscape, stacked). About 70% of the album lives at this size.

Getting ready, ring close ups, the ceremony, post-ceremony, then reception, then dancing, then leaving. The album reads like a sequence because it is one. 

A practical mention. 4 x 6 is also the cheapest print size at most photo labs. So if you're printing 80 photos for a full album, going mostly 4 x 6 keeps the cost down. The 5-6 hero portraits in the larger format are the upgrade. 

Speaking of Hero Portraits.

Every ten pages or so, drop in another 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm, both pictured in landscape above). Two landscape hero images flow across the spread.

Could be a dance floor moment. The portrait of you and your dad. The shot of you both walking back down the aisle. Whatever moments or close ups that deserve to be sat with rather than flipped past.

Vary the rhythm. A spread of 4 x 6s, then a hero, then more 4 x 6s. The interior designer in me thinks about this the same way I think about a wall. Not every artwork at the same scale. A big quiet piece, then a grouping of smaller things, then space, then another anchor. The album works the same way and keeps the interest flowing. 

A few sizes I'd avoid.

People sometimes ask about 6 X 8 or 8 X 10 (inches). The honest answer is they don't fit a slip-in album well. They overwhelm the page. The album as an object starts to feel like a portfolio rather than a keepsake.

If you want a single oversized print of one specific photo, frame it and hang it on a wall. The album is for the sequence and the story of the day. Big single prints belong somewhere else in the house.

Some notes about our album.

The DOSSI wedding album is linen-bound, foil-embossed, Designed and shipped from Melbourne. The pages are self-adhesive and archival. The materials are pH-neutral, so the photos and ephemera inside don't yellow over time. It comes with 20 double sided inserts (So 40 adhesive sides) holds up to 80 standard prints, or roughly 160 Polaroids (if you choose to fill exclusively with Polaroids), alongside the paper bits of the day.

It lives on a coffee table or shelf. Not in a cupboard.

If you want one, it's here.

If you need to know where to get your photos printed, see our photo printing guide for Australia.

Time to pull together your Wedding Album. Even if your wedding was years ago, it's never too late to build this heirloom.

- Ash