A wedding gift from all of us

A friend group holds photographs the family does not have, and that is the entire argument for this gift over anything on the registry.

You have the years the parents missed

A wedding gift from the whole family draws on an archive that goes back to childhood. A gift from a friend group draws on something narrower and less duplicated: the decade the two of them were becoming a couple, mostly undocumented by anyone else, mostly on phones.

The house share. The bad holiday. The night they were introduced, in a photograph where neither of them is the subject and both happen to be in the background.

Nobody else can give them that, because nobody else was there.

The worst picture is usually the one

The photographs from that period are often genuinely poor — dark, taken on an old phone, someone's elbow across a third of the frame. The instinct is to rule them out on quality.

That instinct is usually wrong. The oldest and worst photograph in a group is frequently the one that matters most, and it is normally the one the couple has never seen, because it has been sitting in one person's camera roll since 2014. The guide on the worst photograph covers how far a poor source can actually be taken.

Ask for the story, not just the file

A photograph from a friend group needs its line, or it is a picture of some people in a kitchen. This is the night she made everyone stay for the washing up. One sentence per contributor is enough, and it is the part that gets read.

Set a real date for it. A wedding has a fixed day and the collecting always takes longer than anyone plans for.

Leave the date off the piece

A wedding gift that carries the date is about a day. One that carries the years before it is about two people, and is still worth having when the day is a long way back.

Signature is sized for a piece a group is putting their names to.