So my wedding is over…. and I immediately found myself with just a lot of free time! I miss all the planning, so much that I’ve offered my help to my wedding planner and it looks like we may be working together

But I still managed to find a few things to do, related to my wedding, and I’m still not done….

This is a list of things that you may want to consider after your wedding is over… and what I’ve done so far:

1. As soon as I got back, I posted all my pictures at Smugmug. The reason I chose this site over all other free sites available was mainly because they allow you an unlimited number of photo uploads and all in original high resolution. You can also customize the look of your site and people can order prints directly from it. It does cost money, but it’s under $30 for an entire year which I think is worth it!

2. For those of you who are computer geeky like me, you can setup an FTP site so that all your guests can easily upload their photos to you. I did this and got over 1000 photos from guests. All they had to do was go to my private URL and drag and drop their photos there. There are tons of photo sharing websites where you could do something similar to this…. I found that asking people to email me was just a waste of time because they all took so many pictures the emails were just bouncing back to them for size limitations.

3. I wanted to give everyone a thank you note for attending our wedding… and then I thought of a really good idea! I created a DVD out of all the professional pictures I received, our rehearsal dinner, bachelor/rette parties, honeymoon, random photos, guest photos, etc… I did this using Nero Express but if you have a computer with a DVD burner you will most likely have a software that came with it, from Windows… there is something called Windows Movie Maker as well. The DVD came out extremely nice! It ended up having about 14 chapters, each with 100 pictures, and music that I added to each of them. I even included a few videos that we had. My mom has watched the DVD probably 40 times so far with friends and she always comes back saying they want more!

I created a really nice cover with a picture of us and a little Thank you note and we’re sending a DVD to each person who attended.

4. I also created a few picture books…. my favorite site for doing this is Kodak Gallery. I purchased the basic book which has 30 pages and fits about 100 photos, depending on the layouts that you chose. I used a custom cover of the theater where we had our ceremony and it looks like a story book! It’s truly beautiful. The cost is about $30 per book and it’s an excellent gift for your parents and new parents-in-law. They also have some mini-books that I thought would be a really neat present for your bridal party members.

5. Magnolia Dude had mentioned he wanted to make a nice Collage of photos to hang on the wall… and since I’m all about technology and digitalization! I used Kodak Gallery once again to create a really cool collage of photos and I framed it for him…. he absolutely loved it! I put about 50 pictures in it and it’s a 16×20″ size poster.

6. Not long ago I had received a discount card for Canvas on Demand…. I decided to use it, and purchased a 16×24″ Canvas with one of our pictures… I chose the pixelation as an option so that it looked like a real painting. I just received it back a couple of days ago and I’m in love with it! It looks like a painting, it’s absolutely gorgeous!

This is it on my to-do list besides my change of name which is a whole other list of its own! I have tried to keep in touch very closely with all of my guests after our wedding and have been printing all the wonderful messages that we’ve received. My mom is working on a scrapbook where we’ll place all our wedding memorabilia along with all the emails, messages, comment cards, etc…