In the last couple years I’ve been to my fair share of weddings (7 i believe) and a corollary of this is being party to far too many conversations about wedding planning. How it’s complicated, how you have to book this and then decide that. I actually don’t mind hearing about wedding planning but I have no pity for making it stressful for no reason. In my limited exposure to wedding planning you really have 9 tasks, all of which can be pretty much finished in a few weekends of work. They are: dress, suit, guest list, invites, officiant, venue, hotel, food, flowers, and photographer. Everything after that is really just a detail which can usually be deferred to anyone’s better judgment.

But thanks to Tobias Lütke, this list can now be reduced to just 8 items. Tobias (who I met at Railsconf) and his wife actively crowdsourced their wedding photos with a contest. Since it seems that every second person now owns a digital SLR and flickr pro accounts, it’s no surprise that you can get professional looking photos from the guests you’d invite anyways. My friends Matt and Kathleen did this exact thing at their wedding this year. They got our friend Ram to take lots of photos (including the more traditional wedding photos), had disposable cameras for more piles of random shots, and then setup a “mathleen” flickr photo pool to collect and share all the photos. Tobias and Fiona took it a step further by adding cash prizes and a system for tagging the photos (though i’ll bet this has more to do with the that half that there were a ton of nerds there).

Credits to scottica for the first photo and Ram for the second. On a complete side note, I downloaded, cropped, scaled, and uploaded the photos in this post with an online photo editor called picnik. It’s so damn handy for quick photo editing.