The Perfect Wedding Gift Photo

What’s a good wedding gift photo? Something in a frame? Perhaps – or how about something in an online community? The modern world meets the modern marriage.

We’ve been sharing our photos online now for a few years, using social media and networking sites to create whole communities around the images of our lives. So what better way to go with a wedding gift, which of course is supposed to mark one of the most important events in anyone’s life, than by memorialising it with a digital wedding gift photo? We commemorate all the other events of our lives on web sites and in the collective public eye of digital media forums – why not weddings?

The beautiful thing about using the Internet as a medium for wedding gifts is that a whole community can be created around them. Again, we’re tapping into our own zeitgeist here: we already involve ourselves in communities whose express online purpose is to examine, celebrate and remember our own lives. In a sense, the Internet is the new place where people go to hang out, to define themselves and to mark all the special occasions of their existence. Using a digital wedding gift photo instead of a physical framed piece of paper allows the happy couple to add their wedding in to the online experience of their lives – to celebrate digitally in the same way that the actual ceremony allowed them to celebrate in the “real world”.

There are sites around now (the excellent Shoebox 360 springs to mind) that allow users to create a full community around sets of wedding photos – which means that the occasion can be dissected and enjoyed in the fullest digital senses of the words. The wedding is brought to life, online, by the overlapping comments, perceptions and memories of the members of its community – the people who were there, and who have been able to contribute a digital wedding gift photo to the overall montage.

Moreover, digital wedding photos can be printed, of course. That’s part of the beauty of the digital wedding celebration community site. While “normal” wedding photos are aimed at an album (and so are often boring and staged), digital shots are just frank recollections of the emotional moments that occurred during the day. They can be chosen, highlighted, grouped into sets, discussed, forwarded – and, if any of them look like the kind of shot that would look good in a frame, they can be printed and set in albums or on mantelpieces too.

The digital wedding gift photo, like all digital stuff, is simply more versatile and more in tune with modern living than a paper image. We live differently now to the way we lived even 10 years ago. The Internet and its communities are our home. Using it, and them, properly can bring an extra, long lasting dimension of love and light to a celebration of two people’s union. Marriage might be an old and hallowed institution – but it’s just been brought into the 21st century.