How Many Weddings Can You Actually Edit Per Week?
A simple way to work out how many weddings you can edit per week, based on your real editing hours and how long each wedding takes you, so you book a season you can deliver.
To work out how many weddings you can edit per week, divide your usable weekly editing hours by the hours one wedding takes you end to end. If a wedding is twenty hours of culling and editing and you have twenty usable editing hours a week, that is one wedding a week, before you add family sessions or reshoots into the same hours.
Count usable hours, not working hours
The common mistake is planning around a forty hour week. Shoots, enquiries and everyday admin all take from that total, so the hours left for editing are usually far fewer. Track a normal fortnight honestly and you will often find fifteen to twenty five real editing hours a week, which is the number your capacity actually runs on.
Measure your true hours per wedding
Time one recent wedding from import to delivered gallery: culling, editing, exporting, gallery build and any album. Use your own figure rather than a number from a group, because editing pace is personal. Once you know your real hours per wedding, the weekly limit is simple arithmetic you can book against.
Leave slack for the season
Booking to your exact maximum leaves no room for a slow week or a wedding that overruns. Planning to roughly eighty percent of your theoretical limit keeps your turnaround times safe when the season gets bumpy, which it always does.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to edit a wedding?
Most wedding photographers spend somewhere between fifteen and thirty hours per wedding across culling, editing, exporting and building the gallery, depending on shooting style and how many images are delivered. Time one of your own recent weddings to get your personal figure rather than relying on an average.
How do I stop weddings piling up in the same weeks?
Plot each wedding's editing hours onto the weeks before its delivery deadline, not just the shoot date. Production heat in lemon.gallery does this automatically, so you can see which weeks are already full and space new bookings into the clear ones.
Should I cap how many weddings I book?
Yes. A booking cap based on your real editing hours is what protects your turnaround times and your evenings. Work out your weekly limit, plan to roughly eighty percent of it, and treat that as the ceiling for a healthy season.
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