How to Organize Your Wedding Inspiration
There are a number of different vendors who will work together to make your wedding day the gorgeous event you've envisioned, and one of the best ways to communicate your vision to everyone involved is by providing clear photographs and context as to what you like. However, any vendor will tell you that too much imagery is both overwhelming and unnecessary. While it's an important part of your process to sort through ideas and gather the elements you're most drawn to, editing the imagery down to clear up the clutter will ultimately save you time during your meetings with vendors. Doing so will also allow you to easily reference concepts as you move through different phases of the wedding planning process. Here are some foolproof ways to organize your wedding inspiration.
Related: Expert-Approved Tips for Establishing Your Wedding's Color Palette
How to successfully use Pinterest as a design tool
If you're someone who loves to collect inspiration imagery and create mood boards, Pinterest is likely going to be the best way for you to reference your ideas. You can keep your ideas private or collaborate with your vendors or friends. Rather than having a wedding board with all your ideas on it, consider creating a few boards by topic so they're easy to reference when you're preparing for meetings. For example, bridal style (wedding dresses, hair and makeup, accessories), groom style (attire, hair, accessories), wedding party (attire, gifts), floral design (bouquets, tabletop, ceremony installations), paper materials (invitations, calligraphy, signage), guest experience (welcome bags, logistics), atmosphere (furniture, lighting, music), and venues are all categories you'll likely need to reference.
After discussing with your vendors how they prefer to see your design ideas, you might decide to invite them to your boards as a collaborator. If you go this route, it may be helpful to make notes on your pins and sign them so that your vendor knows what you like about the image. In this case, you'll still want to bring your top imagery to meetings and discuss images you feel are important in communicating your aesthetic.
Since Pinterest has apps across various devices, it's one of the best ways to gather ideas in different contexts. For example, if you're flipping through a print magazine and spot an image you'd like to save, take a quick phone photo and upload it to your Pinterest account for reference. This way, you're not collecting stacks of printed images in addition to the digital imagery.
Save your files to a file sharing service
If you prefer to skip Pinterest and keep your imagery to minimum, you might find that taking screenshots and downloading images works best for you to track your favorite picks. If you go this route, organizing the files can be more tedious, but using a file sharing app or cloud storage service makes it easy to share these ideas with friends and vendors when necessary. To save you a lot of searching time, consider naming each file you save with a title that recalls the category of inspiration. If you find you're collecting more imagery than you'd planned for, you can instead break your images into categorized folders.
Always collect your top images before heading to any design meetings
To save time and keep your meetings on track, you should plan to present only your top images to your vendors. You can either clean up your inspiration boards before heading into meetings with your designer or planner, deleting images that no longer resonate, or you can transfer your top images to a mood board or separate file for sharing. By sharing only your top three to five images for each category, you can avoid sending mixed messages and scattered concepts to your vendors. Depending how you organize your files, you'll likely want to keep all of the images saved for later reference just in case you need them—there's not much that's more annoying than having to scour the Internet searching for an image you know exists somewhere!
