The Photo Sharing Experiment

Today I want to show you the results of a project that was a pain in my arse, but that I hope will yield some interesting results. In this day and age, most of the people I know have a digital camera surgically attached to their hand when they attend events. And I don't assume that my showers or the wedding will be any different. As such, I got this idea (probably off TheKnot or WeddingBee) to give guests the opportunity to share their digital photos with us. Lets call this "The Photo Sharing Experiment." And I'm going to use my wedding shower guests as my sample (sans informed consent, thank you!)

I designed these cute and instructional cards in PowerPoint (surprise surprise). Initially, I wanted to do business cards, but I was having a hard time uploading a business card size image to Vistaprint. So I made postcards instead. And found a coupon code to get 100 postcards for free. Postcards are significantly larger than a business card, but still small enough to slide in a purse. Maybe this larger size will mean they'll be less likely to end up in the deep recesses of a handbag (cause I assume everyone's handbag is as deep as mine - lol).

With postcards, you can never quite call which side you're going to see first. But technically, this is the side I expect people to see first:


Naturally, I used the wedding fonts, and for good measure I included our wedding website url. If I'm able to collect any good photos from my showers, I'll make a slideshow for the website. According to Vistaprint, this is the back. Black and white text was included for the back(I did have to pay to upload my image), so I made it black and white. The additional charge to print in color was not worth it.

This is the side I expect everyone to see second:


According to Vistaprint, this the front. So the color printing was included, but I still had to pay to upload my image. Here is where I outlined (hopefully) very simple instructions on how to upload photos to our Flickr site. I chose Flickr for this project for a couple of reasons. First, brides speak very highly of it for this particular purpose. Second, I used Flickr when I designed our Blurb guestbook, and could easily see making an additional photobooks using images guests uploaded. Flickr and Blurb are BFFs, so importing photos into the Blurb software is seamless and stress free.

Ya'll already know this experiment did not cost me very much. About $18, including the uploading fees and shipping. I really hope that the ladies at my shower will pick up a card and upload their photos. I'm not entirely sure this will work, but if people use them, I'm definitely going to order more for the wedding. Probably business card sized this time.

I'll let you know how my little experiment turns out, k.

♥