It is the second week of September. You have six weddings on cards, two more this weekend, and the contract date on the first of them is closer than you would like. Each evening you open Lightroom, edit for an hour and feel further behind than when you started.
This isn’t bad planning. It is what a Canadian season does. The question is how to get through the next eight weeks without missing a date or spending every night at the desk.
Canada’s season is short, and it lands all at once
Survey data on Canadian weddings doesn’t agree on the single busiest month, but it does agree on the shape. Weddingbells reader data, summarised in a University of British Columbia industry overview of the wedding business, shows August as the top month with September second, and about 49% of weddings falling between July and September. A later edition reports 67% between June and September. WeddingWire.ca’s own poll put September at 20% of couples.
Those are surveys, not census data. The practical upshot for an editor is clear enough: most of your year’s weddings arrive in a few months, then October adds its own, and the editing for all of them lands in the same autumn.
Triage: sneak peeks first, then galleries by contract date
The most common trap is editing in the order you shot. That feels fair, but it puts a wedding with a long contract window ahead of one with a short window just because it happened first.
A better order:
- Sneak peeks. Ten to twenty frames per couple, within a few days of the wedding. It buys goodwill and time, and it is the part couples post.
- List every open wedding by contract delivery date, not by wedding date.
- Mark anything with a fixed outside deadline: an album order, a slideshow at a family event, a couple moving abroad.
- Edit from the top of that list down. The weddings with the most room wait.
Put the list somewhere you look every day. A spreadsheet with four columns (couple, wedding date, contract date, status) is enough.
What to keep in-house and what to hand off
You don’t have to outsource everything to catch up. Most studios keep the parts that carry their name the most and hand off the parts that are mostly hours.
| Keep in-house | Hand off |
|---|---|
| Sneak peeks | The full cull from the card |
| A handful of hero portraits you want to finish yourself | Grading the full gallery to your preset |
| The final look-through before delivery | Retouching skin and distractions on close portraits |
| Talking to the couple | The consistency pass across scenes |
| Highlight and feature films, if you shoot both |
If you send us the full card, the cull happens before the grade: best expression, sharp focus, no near-duplicates, down to the count in your package. A Wedding gallery is 300 to 500 images from up to 3,000 raws, for C$110, and comes back with your Lightroom catalogue so you can change anything before it goes out.
To keep your look, send your preset and three edited frames you are happy with. We grade test frames against those and check them side by side before the rest of the set is touched.
Use rush only where a deadline needs it
Rush delivers in 72 hours instead of seven business days, for +50% on the whole order. On a Wedding gallery that is C$165 instead of C$110.
It is worth paying for in a few cases:
- The contract date is inside seven business days and the wedding is already late.
- There is an outside deadline, like an album or an event slideshow.
- A couple has asked and you want to keep the relationship.
It is not worth paying for to make a backlog feel smaller. If a wedding has three weeks before its contract date, the standard seven business days gets it there with room for a revision round. Standard turnaround is counted from the point your link works and the brief is complete, with weekends and Canadian public holidays not counted.
The retainer for peak months
If you are sending more than a wedding a week through the season, the retainer is worth a look: five projects a month at 15% off.
A few things that make it work well:
- It suits a heavy June to October. Plan the five around your busiest weeks.
- Use the same preset and references. Send them with each project, and update them when your style changes.
If your winter is quiet, you don’t need it all year. Use it for the months where the calendar is full and go back to single projects after.
Talk to couples before they ask
Most of the stress in a backlog comes from not knowing which couples are getting anxious. A short, honest update removes most of it, and couples who get one rarely chase.
A few habits that help:
- Send the sneak peek with a date. “Your full gallery will be with you by the end of October” sets the expectation and gives you a target.
- Update anyone who is close to their date. A two-line email a week before is better than a delay they discover themselves.
- Don’t promise faster than your plan. If the list says six weeks, say six weeks. Coming in early is a pleasant surprise; coming in late costs you the review.
- Use the quiet season to fix the contract. If every fall ends like this, a longer delivery window in next year’s contract may be the cheapest fix of all.
A word on the time difference
Our editing team is in Pakistan. Toronto is nine hours behind in summer and ten in winter; Vancouver is twelve and thirteen. The team works in shifts around the clock, so a wedding you send on a weekday evening is picked up soon after it arrives.
That is not overnight delivery. The clock is still seven business days. What it does mean is that you can send a wedding whenever you get home from shooting it, and it isn’t waiting for an office to open.
Your next step
If you are behind now, send the wedding at the bottom of your list and see what comes back.
- Start with the free trial. Your first Gallery project or Highlight film is free, with no card.
- Compare single projects, rush and the retainer on packages.
- See what happens each day on how it works, and how revisions work in the FAQ.
For what each package includes and how the prices compare with per-image editing, read what it costs to outsource wedding photo editing in Canada.