6 Ways to Use Your Engagement Photos

Why You Should Get Engagement Photos

An engagement session with your photographer is so much more than just getting pretty photos nowadays. An engagement session a great way to meet your wedding photographer in person and make sure that you work well together. As a Southeast & Mid Michigan wedding photographer, I believe the key to amazing photos both at your engagement session and on your wedding day is trust and it all starts with meeting your photographer for a session.

Hi friend! I’m Catie Eovaldi- your wedding photographer with a flair for capturing beautiful, emotional, and candid imagery across Michigan. Heading into my fourth year of wedding photography, I’ve found that the best photos are rooted in having trust in your photographer and their plan. A great photographer will get to know you and plan an engagement session that reflects your personality or include sentimental details to make it special (well, extra special since being engaged is already amazing)! I specialize in documenting sentimental moments, and if you’re on the hunt for an engagement or wedding photographer, I would love to connect.

I sometimes hear couples say they don’t want an engagement session, but I’m here to convince you to do one! Not only is this a prime opportunity to get insight into working with your photographer will be like, but after your engagement session you’ll get amazing photos you can use all throughout the different stages of wedding planning. Engagement photos have the potential to be used in several different ways. I believe the worst thing you could do, as a wedding photographer, is to contain those photos on your phone. You want to use, display, and cherish those photos for years and years to come.

6 Uses for Your Engagement Photos

Save-the-Dates and Wedding Invitations

Save-the-Dates and wedding invitations go hand in hand. This one is already the most popular way couples use their engagement photos. Surprisingly though, some couples don’t use their photos for Save-The-Dates! You can make adorable cards or magnets that your guests will want to save. If you aren’t utilizing Save-the-Dates, then you could also do a small print to include in your invitation suite. This may sound cliche, but your families will keep them forever if they have your photo on it. Trust me. I was an October 2023 bride and my father-in-law still has ours on his fridge and it’s now 2026. He keeps it because it’s a photo of us!

Wedding Decor

This one is probably one of my favorite ways you could incorporate your engagement photos. I worked with a couple at Westers Family Vineyard, which you can read more about here. This is a stunning wedding venue in Rives Junction, Michigan. The couple had printed out their engagement photos and displayed them all around the venue. These were large-scale prints of 11×14 & 16×20 put into frames around the venue. It was quite reminiscent of an art gallery. Guests would walk around the room and stop to look at their photos. If you need large prints, I highly recommend reaching out to me to order prints! I work with an amazing print shop that prints beautifully.

If the large-scale prints aren’t totally your vibe, there are other ways you can display them throughout your venue. Bar signage, table numbers, menus, and programs are all things that could use smaller scale prints of your engagement photos.

Fun Activities

There’s nothing I love more on a wedding day than when couples have activities for their guests. It really shows that a couple cares about their guest experience. Incorporating activities into their day for others makes your day extra memorable. To make these activities extra special, add your engagement photos into the mix! I’ve seen giant word searches and crossword puzzles during cocktail hour with engagement photos printed on them. It’s a fun activity and shows off those photos. You could do custom cornhole boards- which I’m finding to be quite the popular thing in Michigan! I’ve heard guests raving about these activities throughout the night!

Another one I’ve seen recently are wedding newspapers. The couple creates a few articles along the lines of “thank you for being here” and “this is how we met”. There are activities spread throughout like the above word searches and crossword puzzles. This is a great idea, especially for guests who may not be able to leave their seat for extended periods of time.

Guest Book

Your guest book doesn’t have to be a blank book where guests just sign their names. We want to be intentional with the way we use our engagement photos. Why not incorporate that into the guest book? Guests will be able to flip through this photo album, and leave a message by their favorite photo of you. I personally did this for my own wedding. We love flipping through our album every once in awhile to see what our guests wrote. I keep my guest book album on our coffee table alongside our wedding album!

I had a couple do this last year, and it turned out great! They used their engagement photos we took in Disney World and turned it into a guest book. For more photos from their day and all the details on their venue, you can read this blog post!

Favors

If you opt not to use your engagement photos for Save-The-Dates, consider using them as favors for your guests! There are so many ways to do this. I always recommend keeping it simple, but personal. Guests are more likely to throw out a favor if it’s not personal or just another drink koozie. Really think about your guests, their experience, and be intentional. I had playing cards as wedding favors at my own wedding, and we still play with them today. Our family gets together once a week to play euchre, and it’s so much fun. We have a potluck style dinner and play cards well into the night! Because of this, I customized the card decks to have one of our engagement photos on them. I ordered them in bulk and they are now the go-to deck of cards when we play! We were intentional with our favors and guests loved them!

Edible favors are least likely to be wasted. Guests will be looking for a little sweet treat throughout cocktail hour or maybe closer to the end of reception. For my this Baker Events Wedding, we had tiny stickers of their engagement photos printed and stuck onto chocolate. I’ve seen this done with cookies as well! Every wedding I’ve attended and worked have never had any leftover edible favors.

Thank You Cards

It is so important to send thank you cards to your guests. Thank them for traveling to celebrate with you. Thank them for their gift. Thank them for the memories. Like your invitations, friends and family are more likely to keep a thank you card if it’s personal. It can take some time for photographers to edit your wedding gallery, so use an engagement photo instead! A pro-tip for thank you cards: postcard stamps are cheaper than regular stamps. I would recommend keeping your message on a postcard brief just for the sake of card space. I think postcards are so fun! I provide postcard templates for thank you cards to my couples. If you’re interested in what else I provide for wedding photography, contact me to learn more!

Meet Your Michigan Engagement Photographer