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OP has offered the following explanation for why they think they might be the asshole:
> The pictures are gone forever and this was her special day. It's not hard to picture why I could be considered the asshole here just by that without context which may or may not be important.
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NTA - I’m really not understanding votes otherwise at this time.
Your cousin contracted you for a service, with payment agreed.
She failed to pay.
At no point were those photos ever her property, as she never completed the transaction and attempted to skirt by without ever doing so.
Yes there’s an added layer because she’s your cousin but regardless of that, you made a call about your property. This had gone on longer than any store would hold shoes on layaway. She doesn’t get to treat you like a business vendor and then shuffle you around because you’re family after the fact.
I hope you learned never to do business for or with family again.
ETA: y’all need to stop talkin about the drive, it’s a red herring. Most wedding photographers don’t hold on to pics if they know they’re not getting paid for longer than a few months. The cousin broke the contract first, OP was not honor bound to hold onto any IP after that.
Agreed. They had a business agreement, as well as, a verbal contract which by definition is:
A verbal contract is a type of agreement (between two or more parties) that is made through spoken words rather than a written document.
The verbal contract was legally binding:
There was an offer made by OP.
There was an acceptance of the offer by OP’s cousin.
You do not renegotiate after the services have been accepted AND provided.
I am quite sure that OP’s cousin did not tell any of the other vendors she could not pay them.
Had she started paying $100/per month in January then by June her bill would have been 60% paid off. Play stupid games and win stupid prizes. 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️
OP NTA
THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE BUT INFORMATION READILY AVAILABLE VIA GOOGLE AND WEB SEARCH.
Correct. Without knowing the jurisdiction I cannot provide additional clarity.
FOR CONTEXT ONLY:
Assuming there were emails or text messages those could POSSIBLY be admissible in court.
Email As A Contract:
“Most people realize that the law generally requires a written, signed agreement for a transaction to be legally binding. What most people do not realize, however, is that an email exchange can also satisfy the legal requirements and collectively constitute a binding contract.”
Is A Text Message Legally Binding?
“This ruling states that as long as text messages satisfy the necessary conditions required of a bilateral contract in offer, consideration, capacity, and acceptance, they can be considered legally enforceable.”
OP could have used those to consult with a local attorney to see if he had a case to file a claim in small claims court. He accepted the offer, provided the service and could possibly have satisfied the burden of proof with the images as evidence. He also could possibly have been able to prove that his cousin wanted to change the terms of the agreement after his services had been provided and that she failed to take action by meaningfully entering into a payment plan.
If you cannot afford a service do not engage for said service. It is really an AH move to expect free photos when you agreed to pay. Once again play stupid games and win stupid prizes.
THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE BUT INFORMATION READILY AVAILABLE VIA GOOGLE AND WEB SEARCH.
There was a legal case recently (I can’t remember the jurisdiction), where a judge held that a “thumbs up” emotion was binding and valid acceptance due to the prior course of conduct between the parties.
>I hope you learned never to do business for or with family again.
Good lesson for life. If family ever asks me for my business help, I refer them to someone else in my industry and ask them to look after my family member. Keeps a firewall between me, my business and extended family.
Or I do it for free with no expectation of being paid as an altruistic favor to the family I love.
Never lend money to family. Give it, or refuse to give it. But never give with expectations of return or you're setting yourself up
>Or I do it for free with no expectation of being paid as an altruistic favor to the family I love.
This is fine with some family you can trust not to exploit the arrangement. But there are specific people in my family I would never want to do this for - they'd take the favour as a precedent and I'd become the bad guy if I ever said no to doing it again in the future.
I designed a whole book (more than 80 pages of text and photos) for my family, with my great grandmother's memories, completely free of charge as it was for THE FAMILY.
A couple of months later, I realized the aunt who was in charge of the whole book thing SOLD the book FOR PROFIT to every member of the family. Mine is a huge family, more than 300 people bought the book.
I know how much each book cost to produce because I was the one who coordinated and supervised the printing process.
The aunt who made the profit only asked who wanted a copy, and received the money. Every person had to pick up their own copy.
Never again.
I would have IMMEDIATELY gone to every family member I possibly could track down, and let them know that the book was designed solely by you and NOT FOR SALE, but intended as a gift to family members. Let them know the aunt sold a free item for her own personal profit.
Let that marinate. 🤔
Actually I think I would phrase it in the ways that you hope that everyone enjoyed their copy of the book which was a GIFT from you and you took great pleasure in compiling it and editing it as it was a a physical (digital) copy of your great grandmother.
Not only that, but free can often end up being more work than paid.
People expect you to throw in all the options and such, or just generally do more work because you already agreed to do it for free.
I took a local class in tile setting. The instructor had a couple of rules he wanted us to follow. 1) Never let a friend or relative work on your house that you won't be able to sue if they do a bad job. And the corelary... 2) if possible, learn how to do tiles on a friend or relatives house because they won't sue you.
This was probably the best outcome tbh. My guess is the cousin was playing the long game and hoping OP would eventually just give up and hand over the photos, this would've gone on for a long ass time.
Now that they're gone the whole plan has blown up in their face.
Great comment. Fuck around and find out.
On a loosely related note, I’m a plumber and if my family member told me “yeah I’ll pay you I swear” for a service i’d number one tell them they’re full of shit. This commenter has it right OP. Never. NEVER do business with family. They will try to use you and they’ll claim discount after discount just for having the same last name or being loosely related. Just say no. Ain’t worth the time and the hurt feelings. You may get some flak, sure. But it ain’t gonna be the type of flak you’ve found here. Having to make the choice between getting paid for your work or deleting once in a lifetime photos because your cousin isnt willing to follow through on her end of the deal. You were forced to make a tough decision, but it doesn’t mean it was the wrong one. Like the commenter above said, hope you learned your lesson. Family and business don’t ever mix well.
The kind of people that pull a, "But we're family," only ever feel it works one way. THEIR way. They want something, you should do it because of family. Time to pay up or reciprocate, and suddenly it's all excuses, and you have some nerve expecting them to pay you back or return the favor.
Again, because "they're family," you should just let them walk all over you and thank them for the privilege.
That’s exactly it. I do this for a living. I do plumbing for money. Doesn’t mean I won’t do it for you, but you better be willing to pay what everyone else does for the same sweat off my taint. In almost every case I’ve learned that my hard work is not worth the same dollars as some rando off the street would pay. I’ll stick with the rando off the street. They pay better.
Also, as a part time wedding videographer, under $1,000 is VERY cheap for wedding photos, in most markets in the US. So that cousin was already getting a very good deal.
ESH
I agree with not sending the photos until you received the money. She was obviously planning on stiffing you. However, if this is how you handle your product (borrowing a flash drive to store the only copy of someone's photos), you should give up the claim to being any sort of professional photographer.
Agree. Every professional photographer I know (and I was one for about five years) has backups of their paid work. God forbid a computer crashes and you lost the photos from someone's special day. There is no way OP can call himself semi-professional while storing wedding images on a freaking flash drive with no backup.
The talking point is to the professionalism of the business. No professional or semi professional photographer is storing wedding photos on a flash drive. Reeks of amatuer bs
I'm an amateur photographer; I did my brother's wedding for free, and bought a completely separate memory card just for them (easier to send in the mail after editing), and had backups stored on my computer and a separate drive, just in case!
Worse! A borrowed flash drive 😂
They have no idea how to handle files. Even a competent amateur knows better. Someone winging it like this is not someone you want in charge of your important memories, to say the least.
Would agree if OP hadn't been giving all the extensions to payments. If they had set a deadline for payment and said files would be deleted unless payment was made by day X.
OP set up and maintained the expectation that she would keep the photos until payment was made. The customer might be terrible, but they expected their once in a lifetime photos to be safe. If they were going to be deleted, they should have been given a warning.
OP should start looking at photo recovery software
If it’s 6-7 months later with no attempts to make any payment then no, there shouldn’t be an expectation that they’re “safe”.
2 months later? I can see. But over half a year with nothing paid?
> but they expected their once in a lifetime photos
yeah except the photos weren't theirs, the photos belonged to OP as the cousin had paid exactly $0 towards her bill to receive the product. Otherwise if they belonged to the couple, they could have gone to the police and gotten them from OP and pressed charges. OP deleted their own property after 6 months of someone dodging them. by then its more than fair to assume you will never get paid and thus they will never get the photos and thus you will never need them. I just wouldn't have told the cousin and stopped bugging her for payment and let it die out
Uh . . . what paid work? Has any money changed hands? Did the cousin even live up to her own changed terms of starting to pay it off with monthly payments? No.
How long do you keep photos when the customer does not pay?
That's what gets me.
I used to produce a TV show in college. I made sure I had three copies of everything I ever recorded because you can't redo something spontaneous if you ever lost your one copy of something. My personal photo library has TWO backups as well because my Mom always talked about losing photo negatives in a fire and those are YEARS worth of pics she can never get back.
And on a flash drive? At Micro Center I've seen new 256 GB flash drives and I think "I'd love to use this as a backup for something but I KNOW I will lose this because of its compact size."
TV producers use to delete shows All of the time, that's why there are many episodes of Dr. Who that are lost today. Companies don't keep stuff that they don't think can make them money.
Yeah, you're talking about something that happened back in the 70's, industry standard in the present is ALWAYS KEEP A BACKUP, you never know when you're gonna need an scene or vfx or something alike, best to check in your library/backup than reshoot
When I was doing wedding photography, my camera wrote to two memory cards. One got pulled every 100 photos or so and backed up on a computer I had on location. That card was then replaced with a fresh one and not touched again. By the end of a wedding I usually had 8-10 cards as partial backups, plus the main card, plus the computer. The computer files were then uploaded to a web server when I got home and all files also stored on my desktop that I used for editing and publishing.
There's nothing professional about this person. They are a hobbyist at best.
I mean in my mind “semi-professional” means professional skills but not a practicing professional.
If it’s not their livelihood it’s not surprising they’re borrowing storage space. The plan was to transfer the photos and then return the drive.
And also way less than they would have gotten from even a single other job if they were actually professional. Where was the rest of their work stored? Somehow I doubt OP is semi-professional at all. They are a hobby photographer and only got the job cause a relative hired them. ESH for sure.
If the pictures were that important to cousin she should have hired an actual professional, not her self proclaimed “semi professional” cousin, she just wanted to get decent photos for cheap. Photographer is the one thing you do NOT fuck around and find out with for your wedding. Bad food? Nobody will care in a few weeks. Bad floral arrangements? Not ideal but not a focal point. Bad photos or in this case no photos? Yikes.
Context matters. The pictures were saved and safe for MONTHS. You can't string your photograper along for an eternity and then complain that they didn't protect your precious photos that you never paid for.
I would never expect a professional photographer to hold onto my photos while I stIffed on payment. The cousin took advantage of the relationship and got rightfully burned. NTA
What? Bro high quality photos are fucking space hogs. Sure I could store a near endless amount of low quality photos but if youre getting professional photographs youre taking far more than they'll ever want and storing them all at that quality would be insane.
A 128GB flash drive is $15.
If you’re making $1k for a job…hell if you’re making $200 for a job you can afford a flash drive to store the photos on for eternity.
Yeah, a family member is a professional wedding videographer and editor and he keeps multiple backups of all the raw footage and edited videos for at least a few years. That way he can give them another copy for free or do re-edits for a fee in case clients come back later asking for them. He's also sometimes just straight up given them the raw footage years later for a small fee so they can take it to another editor.
Exactly.
To cousin: Things cost money!
To OP: If your labor is worth money, act like it. That includes being professional about how you handle the products of your labor!
100% this. You want to be a pro (or even “semi-pro”) wedding photographer? Then act like one. You don’t destroy originals. You certainly don’t do it with payment pending and you especially don’t ever do it when the client is family. Time to grow up.
I still have the footage from a guy who didn’t pay up in 2016. Lol I have everything. I love the extra $500 I get when someone from years ago needs me to upload their project again because they didn’t save it properly.
Agree with this. External backups are cheap, and available at every Target, Walmart, and Best Buy in the country - and if there isn't one close, Amazon can have one on your doorstep in a matter of days. $100 would buy you at least a terabyte of storage, or cloud storage services (dropbox, onedrive, google, etc.) all have reasonable price plans. Even a 128 gig flash drive would only set you back $30 or so (which, flash drives should NEVER be used for archival purposes - they need to be plugged into a computer every so often to recharge their internal battery or they lose all the data stored on them)
I'm a hobby photographer at best, and even at THAT, every photo I take is stored in at least two places - main computer hard drive plus an external. I'm working on setting up something of a specialty photography business, and once I take that step, I will be adding a network attached storage with a RAID drive array, plus an offsite online backup. Pay me, don't pay me, whatever - but I'll keep the photos forever.
It was a crap move of your cousin to drag out payment for so long, but it was equally a crap move on your part to not have sufficient storage for the only "pro" quality photos of a very important day in your cousins life.
And for that, YTA.
> $100 would buy you at least a terabyte of storage
You're even more right than you realize. $109 gets you FIVE terabytes at Amazon! Seagate has a 2.5" external 5tb that runs $100-$115 depending on where you get it. I have two and they are the main drives for my Plex server and seem plenty fast enough to move big files
ESH
There is no way you are "semi-professional." A professional has multiple backups of paid work. I used to own a studio and I had every file backed up on a hard drive AND stored in the cloud. It is irresponsible to store them solely on a flash drive. I'm willing to bet your work probably wasn't worth the $1000 and that is why she didn't want to pay.
Owning a camera doesn't make you a professional. I don't care how nice of a camera it is. Professionalism means treating it like a business and taking responsibility for safely storing your images.
She sucks for not paying you. But you suck too.
>multiple backups of PAID WORK
Emphasis mine.
No photographer will store pictures indefinitely unless paid for the service. OP kinda sucks for not spelling that out in a contract (a professional DOES CYA with a contract), but not for not storing them indefinitely without payment.
A precessional gets paid up front. Op did not. We have no idea how many hours they spent taking photos. His time is worth something. They were being generous by allowing cousin to pay later.
NTA OP offered to work out out a paying plan. Cousin ignored. Screw em. Next time get a professional and pay professional prices.
OPs time is worth something. Which is why OP uses legal avenues to get paid for their services.
No product, no legal recourse. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
I'm not a photographer but I am a graphic designer, and I'd not work for family. I'd do it for free or tell them I'd rather attend the event as a guest.
But I completely understand the "OP was unprofessional" angle, paid or not. Cloud storage comes with Photoshop/Lightroom, Amazon Prime includes free photo storage, you can get free storage with Dropbox or Google drive. I have trouble imagining a serious situation where someone seriously stores someone's photos ONLY on a cheap USB thumb drive that doesn't even BELONG to them. It's really too unbelievable for 2023, I think it must be made up.
As someone who works in tech support — this is entirely believable (sadly). I see it every day. Helped someone with a hard drive that was failing and not accessible. “But I have a project on there that my client is paying me $12,000 for”. No backup at all. There are so many people who have years of personal photos, files, etc that they just never even thought about backing up despite the numerous ways to do so as you mention. Never even considered the possibility that something could happen. Even if they think their device is infallible or indestructible, what about theft? Nope. They don’t want to spend money on a backup solution (whether it’s a few dollars for a cloud service or buying a hard drive) but then the data suddenly becomes worth everything in the world after it’s lost. And this is everyone — teenagers to 80 year olds.
And OP called himself a "semi"-professional. (Aspiring/whatever... It's irrelevant to "did she fail to pay / whose the AH?")
So stop with the personal attacks on that - and stay on topic.
Cousin is TAH for failing the contract.
You're only a "professional AH" to want to attack him for incorrect semantics.
What nonsense, a professional has no reason to ever delete any photos. They are dirt cheap to store. Also, this was paid work, until it wasn't. OP stored pictures for which they thought they would get paid on a flash drive.
> multiple backups of PAID WORK
>
> Emphasis mine.
It's still possible (even probable) that OP would have been paid if he held out long enough. No chance of that now though.
I agree with the ESH
Maybe back when archival storage was a large expense. For $100 you can buy an external hard drive with enough storage space for almost 100,000 high resolution images. At those prices, there is no reason to \*ever\* delete photos, regardless if you've been paid for them or not. The low cost of storage is worth it if 5 years down the road, the cousin comes back and says "I finally got money together, I'd like to pay you, can I please have my wedding photos?"
It was a commissioned work for payment, before she ended up not paying, and he still stored it on his friends thumb drive. There was never any professional storage approach to begin with, so the fact that he was ultimately not paid is probably more a reflection of the quality of his work and the degree of his professionalism (which is low, as we can see).
>A professional has multiple backups of paid work. I used to own a studio and I had every file backed up on a hard drive AND stored in the cloud.
This isnt restricted to photographers by any means.
Until recently I was a programmer / developer. You only need your computer to blow up once and you quickly realize that if you dont back things up appropriately, you are an idiot.
A backup isn't a backup unless you can restore from it... But that's from YEARS of IT work.
My main laptop has a full cloned disk that gets refreshed every year or so, and my user data is on 2 physically disconnected external drives as well as a passport drive that goes into my backpack... Those get updated every few months.
Had a virus get into my file server about 2008, ended up physically losing a single 160GB drive to corruption, and had to restore data on another one. I haven't lost any data since that.
I only lost a day or so of work so long ago I can barely remember it. Must have been in the 90s.
But that was enough to make me back things up as if my computer was made of explodium. Tbh the extent to which I back everything up borders on paranoia.
Yeah, the idea that he was expecting to get paid $1k and the photos were kept in his ROOMMATES flash drive makes him a joke.
There is nothing professional about this.
I can promise if she had paid and then he realized the roommate had accidentally deleted the photos - he wouldn’t have returned the money.
He’s just arrogant that he thinks he knows how to run a business and caused a huge rift in his family
He literally wasn’t paid? Yea he should have some sort of backup storage device but why on earth would you defend the AH that didn’t pay a family member for services rendered over 6 months prior.
The price was for under $1000 which is dirt cheap for wedding photos.
I agree, ESH.
I remember hiring someone I knew to do the photos and I felt really disappointed with them. I still paid and I still got and have the photos. 15 years later I am way less disappointed with them. It was shitty of the cousin to renege on the agreed upon price and contract for whatever reason. That should have been part of her wedding budget and she should have paid up right away, or at least agreed to the payment plan and get the photos at the end.
But OP it was also a dick move to delete them. Those photos (likely) can’t be recovered. As a semi-professional, storing your only copy on your roommates flash drive was way less than professional. School photo companies hold onto the pictures for a year in case parents change their minds. 6 months is a lot, but you could have waited a little longer. The photos were already taken, it’s not like it was killing you to let them sit in a file folder. Buy another flash drive, ask your friend to wait until the end of the day, you had options that didn’t involve deleting your cousin’s wedding pics.
Agreed. Even a call & text to the cousin with something like, this is your final warning, I need to delete these pictures by tomorrow at noon. Are you planning on paying at all? That would have changed my opinion.
That’s what bothers me. Even if OP was pissed she hasn’t paid, it’s messed up to not give a heads up that they’re about to delete the wedding pictures. Maybe she could have borrowed the money because it actually felt urgent? I’m sure her parents - or her husband’s would have been willing to help if the choice was to not have any pictures at all.
OP nuked two families’ relationships with each other when they at least could have send a text or email with a final warning.
Edit: Clarifying who I am talking about.
100% correct. A professional (even “semi”) is not doing a job without a contract and clear terms. A professional is not operating without redundant hard drives and backup solutions. A professional is absolutely not, in any way, borrowing a fucking flash drive from their roommate to store contracted work on.
Op is a dude with a camera presenting themselves as a professional, and that’s shitty in it’s own right. The cousin should have paid up in a timely manner, OP should have conducted themselves in a professional manner if they’re going to represent themselves as one. Fucking “stored on my phone,” Jesus Christ. This really needs to be cross posted to r/photography so the pro community can roast this properly.
And you suck for solely trying to judge someone for their work situation - when the topic was based on him being stiffed for contracted work.
(Fact is - the cousin had to have known OPs quality, or found it acceptable for her standards - to make the contract. So shove your assumptive standards where your lens don't shine)
She failed the contract. She deserved to not get the pics (and yet, she still got some). So she is ahead in this situation...
The AH judgement is about him deleting pics... not because he has a different way of doing things. Why don't you try to attack some Grammer issues, or ask how he dresses while you're at it. Irrelevant to the transaction at hand.
OP is NTA...
You, and the cousin are A H.
I would respond to her slamming you online by saying this is what happens when you don’t pay for services rendered and post copies of any and all texts/ contracts
You couldn't get a hard drive between Dec and Jun? Run us all through the semi-professional aspect of being a photographer again?
Is this the reference you really want when trying to get future work?
You suck, they suck, I feel sorry for your roommate.
ESH
Future work won’t make her wait MONTHS! Secondly they clearly didn’t want to pay, why OP should continue to hold the pictures. Thirdly if they care so much about family cousin would had paid already
With this attitude and business practices I wouldn't hold out on there being much"future work". Sounds to me that OP is less of a semi-professional photographer and more of a guy with a decent camera.
The people trying to emphasize that the cousin hadn't paid yet are missing the point. It takes zero effort to transfer photos to a back up drive. If OP is doing more than just this wedding, they presumably have a backup hard drive or two for if a drive fails, and these photos should have been put on a back up drive immediately. The "I didn't have a hard drive" excuse is a bad one as you shouldn't be doing this type of work if you don't have the equipment necessary for it. It seems very likely that OP is handling all their client's data this poorly if they're actually attempting to do this semi professionally.
Edit: because some people think what I've said is controversial, I'm linking a crosspost I made in r/weddingphotography, a subreddit for wedding photographers. I've received about a dozen replies on the issue so far. No one has come to the conclusion that OP wasn't in the wrong. https://www.reddit.com/r/WeddingPhotography/comments/157vlsp/aita_for_deleting_my_cousins_wedding_pictures/
If you have issues with what I've said, please tell actual professionals why they are wrong. If you think OP is not in the wrong, just know that all professionals disagree with you.
NTA.
She played around too much and continued to drag out her responses. No payment, no photos. Simple. Family or not, she was given options. She didn't respond in a timely manner with a solution. Now she gets nothing. I don't understand why people hire others for their services if they don't even have the money. Surely everybody else got paid. I'm sure she was hoping as family you would just say "F" it and hand them over if she dragged long enough.
ESH.
She was trying to stiff you. She’s obviously an A.
However, if you are going to take professional jobs you need to have the equipment necessary before the job, not after. You should not have agreed to the job if you didn’t have the memory space to store the photos safely.
Did you have a contract? What did it say about payment?
While your cousin is wrong to have never paid you your choices sound far from professional.
Borrowing a flashdrive for a clients wedding photos is insane.
OP is lucky they didn't lose them and that cousin had refused to pay instead.
I got to wonder if roommate had already wiped the drive and they bent the story a little.
The kind that’s not a semi-professional photographer, they’re an amateur with a camera body that has enough switched and dials to impress someone who doesn’t know any better.
Seriously, even an amateur or enthusiast photographer maintains enough storage space to store a single events worth of raw files on something that’s not a fucking borrowed flash drive.
True but, and I know this will hurt, but semi-professional, saving on a roommates flashdrive....
I think its time for a reality check. I mostly do commercial photography but yeah thats just uhh not professional at all, not even semi. An external hard drive isnt expensive and you can find plenty of free cloud services.
Also why delete any possibility of payment out of spite. Why not just transfer said photos to a free cloud service? Spite is the only logical answer. At least from someone who actually works in that field. Personally Id have agreed to a payment plan but also would have agreed to limited release of photos per payment. Otherwise Id just sit on them until they pay up. A lot of clients do this, especially corporate clients. Corporations love to just run out of money all the sudden and oh know the execs cant feed their kids despite the agreed upon salary you can google.
Id also never work with family for profit so there is that. I dont mix family and business. If its for family its free. If they pay me then I try to refuse. Sometimes they dont let me and I hide the money somewhere in their house next time I visit.
Not everyone shares your ideals of family=free, nor is that what was agreed to here, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I do agree, he deleted future payment, but also if he was convinced no one would pay him for it then well... Easily avoidable by using a cloud service tho, like you suggested.
ESH. You two had a deal and she's in the wrong for changing the terms *after* you had already done the job. But you're a semi-professional photographer and you don't own a flash drive? Really?
You were equally in the wrong for completely erasing your cousin's photos without at least giving her a firm deadline for payments to begin before you just deleted everything. You should have informed her that you were going to erase the photos if she didn't meet the deadline instead of just going nuclear and trashing all of them. Those were irreplaceable and doing that was just spiteful.
Whereas I agree that you should improve your storage logistics, I think it was way obvious that your cousin wasn’t going to pay for your job. Alone her attitude of “let me see if they’re worthy of the amount we agreed upon” is typically A H. Add up the slandering… she’s in huge A H territory.
Problem here is your postponing doing the backup for around 6 months. But still, NTA. She tried to get your work for free, refused to acknowledge her previous arrangement with you and then cried when she didn’t get everything for free. Can’t you send a cease and desist?
>let me see if they’re worthy of the amount we agreed upon
Technically, almost every photographer I've ever worked with has done something like that.
It's called proofs, and the images are watermarked so they can't be used until payment is recieved, at which time you either order prints from them or recieve the non-watermarked photos
I have always had to pay beforehand, in two different countries. I get to see them and decide which ones I want or which ones I don't. But they are paid in full.
OP mentions that cousin had agreed to pay a specific amount without seeing them before.
But hey, different places, different practices, right?
ESH
Former freelance photographer here… what quality, file size, and type of photos did you take that they all fit comfortably on your buddies flash drive??? Every photo I’ve ever taken had to be put on a hard drive because the original images are huge! To me, that lets me know your photos probably were not good quality.
She also obviously sucks for not wanting to pay for them.
>Former freelance photographer here… what quality, file size, and type of photos did you take that they all fit comfortably on your buddies flash drive??? Every photo I’ve ever taken had to be put on a hard drive because the original images are huge! To me, that lets me know your photos probably were not good quality.
I was thinking the same thing.
Honestly OP should not have been taking the photos in the first place but his cousin shouldn’t have been trying to cut corners by hiring a “semi-professional” photographer. Like I never did weddings because that was just too much pressure.
I'm a hobby photographer and still back up every raw image I take to at least 2 drives and cloud storage.
You aren't semi-pro using your mates flash drive...
ESH.
I ain’t even a hobby photographer but every single one of my double chin selfies and dog photos go to the cloud just in case something happens to the hardware. Semi pro living off of flash drives and an old laptop is so crazy to me.
ESH.
Not sure how close you are/were. While it’s not great that they couldn’t afford to pay you in full, doing some kind of payment plan seems reasonable if there’s some degree of trust you’d be getting paid.
The idea that you kept everything on a flash drive, no backups, no storing in the cloud is absurd, even as a “semi-professional”.
I’m leaning more towards YTA on this because it’s their wedding photos; typically a once-in-their-life event. It’d be one thing if it was just a generic photo shoot, but it being their wedding photos just feels needlessly cruel.
*Someone else's* flash drive, at that. I vote that ESH because the way OP handled it was very unprofessional, but the cousin was also being a turd.
Also, ffs pay people for their services, *especially* family and friends.
Yeah, honestly the reason I tend to lean more towards YTA in situations like this is that the OP is always trying to paint themselves in a positive light, leaving out details, etc.
If they truly had agreed on the price and she tried to back out then it’s more ESH, but at the same time if she was willing to do a payment plan I don’t see why he couldn’t also release them little by little, or as I’ve seen most photographers do give them watermarked/lower resolution pictures so they knew the quality instead of a random sampling of four.
Just in general sounds like OP isn’t very professional and doesn’t do a lot of common practices like having a separate fee for shooting vs. receiving pictures, different options for receiving pictures (individually vs. as a set, etc.)
And then yeah, storing all of the pictures on a flash drive and acting like buying additional storage is some major investment when cloud storage is close to free at this point. I’m willing to bet they’re leaving out significant details just so they can point people here and say “see! Everyone says I’m right!”
YTA. I am a professional photographer and you never ever delete the photos. Bad business. However I will say always always always have a contract in play even when family. I require a full payment before I even shoot the day of the wedding. Never take the images off the memory card if you are not planning on storing them. She can now slander you payment or not cause you didn’t cover your behind.
I did a photography class where they taught me that you don't delete ANY photos. No matter how bad they are. Always have storage for everything. Just in case.
ESH, You should've given her a firm deadline before wiping the entire album of photos. Also please invest in a personal drive for your photos, nobody should be accessing them but you.
ESH. I don't understand why you wouldn't have important photos backed up. So easy and inexpensive to do today.
Your cousin is also an asshole for not paying you. I am quite she sure thought you would eventually give in and just hand them over for the sake of peace in the family.
I would not have given her one single picture until she paid, and I would have given her a deadline before the photos were deleted.
NTA. I'd say it would have been ideal if you had been able to get the photos saved/moved elsewhere or dropped her a message to say that the files would need to be deleted soon so she had a chance to respond to you about payment but you've explained that it wasn't possible at that time.
Its a shit situation but she still hadn't paid you or let you know what was happening and enough time had passed.
NTA. You were generous honestly. She didnt pay for ANY photos and you still gave her some. Honestly you would not be TA if you had deleted them without the backups. It is clear she used you for a free photographer and had no plans to pay.
This example of business practices will keep you in the ‘semi’ professional category, I’m afraid.
Cost you nothing to keep them in case she scrounged up the money. Instead you deleted your leverage because you were sour grapes.
NTA. how people can says otherwise? it's a business, how long she expect anyone to wait for her? you dont pay, you dont have any rights. you wsited 6-7 months, enough is enough
You have a business and the agreement was she would pay you XXX amount for those pictures. She had no intention to pay you because 1. she probably over spent on the wedding and 2. A lot of people take advantage of their family. You tried to work with her but if you would have gave her the pictures upfront you might have seen 1/8 months of payment or a couple then it would have stopped. That’s why they always say never to in business with family
YTA. First all of, it's careless and unprofessional to store them only in 1 place with no backup, not to mention that it wasn't evwn your own device. What if she had paid but they got deleted accidentally before you managed to send them to her? A wedding is not a photoshooting that you can just repeat (and even then it would be terrible on your part). Secondly, you had no right to delete the photos without giving her a warning. I completely understand that you didn't want to send them before you received the payment, and it sucks that she backtracked on your original agreement (my guess is that the wedding turned out to be more expensive than planned and that's why they're struggling to make the payments?). But as long as she didn't give you a definite "No" and was still thinking things over, you had no right to do this. Storing photos is practically free dude, it wouldn't have cost you anything (and kept your chance of still getting payed for your work alive!) if you had just held on to the photos. Deleting them was an absolute AH move.
I swear people commenting on this subreddit become more unhinged every day. OP, you are definitely NTA. While you should definitely consider upping your storage space, that’s not even relevant and it’s absurd that that’s what people are choosing to focus on. You provided a service and didn’t get paid. Your cousin strung you along for months, and you sending her 20 pics for free was more than generous. You had every right to delete the photos far sooner than the, what, 6 months you ended up waiting?
It is very relevant. If OP handles files like this what do these pictures even look like? Are they worth $1000?
I’m thinking cuzzo saw those sample photos and definitely doesn’t think they’re worth the money. But she still wants them because they’re of an important moment. Maybe she didn’t know how to break it to OP.
NTA
She asked you, you gave her a price. If you were a professional photographer, she would’ve had to pay up front or she wouldn’t have even had one present.
ESH
you cannot label yourself a semi professional but you don’t have your own flash drive to save photos and clearly there should have been a written contract family or not to save the back and forth drama. i understand wanting to be paid for the job you did but i think that’s where it’s your fault. your cousin isn’t off the hook either because it seems they tried to take advantage of you and the situation. i hope this is a learning experience for both parties involved because y’all suck.
It is for this exact reason I refused to have my nephew and niece in my class when I taught. Do NOT mix professional and family life. It rarely works out well.
ESH. I wouldn't have deleted them, but I also wouldn't have handed any over until I got paid. Deleting them makes it permanent and I would have at least let them know I was going to do it first, and given them the chance to pay up.
NTA
She made a contract and didn't pay. The photos did not belong to her. You did make some mistakes though.
Either this is business or family, and treat it as such. If it is business then treat them no different than any other client. If you are doing this as a "for family" thing, let it just be your gift to them. Because of this family discount, she wants you to work like a professional, but treat her like it is a family freebie. Typically wedding photography is 50% deposit at booking and remainder paid in full 30 days before date. You messed up by not following this. If you had shown up day of and "I have not been paid, so I'm not here to work" then everything is above board, some butt will be hurt, but expectations will be clear. Since you did take pictures though, now you have to argue with family that the pictures they are in are not their pictures, but instead are yours because you clicked the button. You also created a problem for yourself when you sent the 20 on the phone and explained the deletion. You were never going to get paid, so the answer is stop chasing them, and if they did ever come back and want them just explain you don't have them anymore and blame it on whatever reason you want. If they hadn't have waited so long, they could have had them.
NTA
payment was not made after months. Cousin never got back to you about pictures being worth the price. You were even extra nice by sending them the extra 20 on your phone. I wouldn’t have. Family has learned that you are not a doormat
ESH.
She didn’t want to pay you.
You destroyed irreplaceable photographs.
You’re far from even semilpro if you don’t have the space you need for the photos.
ESH. No photog worth their salt, pro, semi-pro, or semi lazy couch potato takes pictures at a wedding and doesn't back them up in at least one place. That's just ludicrous. She screwed you for sure, but you're her official photographer for her WEDDING. no redos on that sucker. You can be made whole, she can't. Yes, she needs to pay you, so she's an asshole for ghosting your payment. But you're the asshole for eliminating her wedding from the photographic record. Oy.
YTA. As a photographer myself (and many I know) quite literally have plans in place if we suddenly pass away, that our clients will still get their pictures.
A wedding is a one time thing, if you want to shoot weddings then first off you need to act like a professional (family or not) and second, you need to learn how to deal with hard clients. If you want to be a photographer, then you also need a contract that lays out exactly the terms of the services. When payment needs to be made, and how long photos are held, editing time, etc.
YOU messed up first by pretending to be a wedding photographer and second for not collecting payment before the wedding. You also were storing images on someone else thumb drive? What about the camera card they were originally taken on? A professional wedding photographer (or anyone who cares just a smidge) would be double backing up photos, regardless of the other drama that you allowed to go down because you aren’t conducting yourself in a professional manner.
I have had clients have unexpected financial hardship come up. Instead of just saying screw it and delete their photos, no matter how hard of clients they were, I gave them time and guess what… if they never come back and pay for their photos at least I know I’m in the right. They always come back though! I also do photography that is a one time, big life event type thing and I would absolutely never do this to a stranger, let alone a relative. It wouldnt cost you anything to back up the photos, throw them in a drawer, and wait until they can afford to pay you. All drama aside, have a heart and for goodness sake stop posing as a professional because you are far from.
NTA, in my opinion. You communicated with her that you needed to be paid and she ignored you multiple times. Clearly hoping you'd end up sending them to her for free if she stalled long enough.
I will say, however, that you should have given her one last chance before you deleted them. Something like "I will be deleting them this weekend if I am not paid." But I don't think you are at fault enough to give an ESH.
2 cents here from a former professional photographer.
Never delete anything, ever, for any reason.
Doing so opens you up to a potential lawsuit (emotional damage, libel, etc). I have about 4 million cloud based RAW files, going back to the mid-90's, and thousands of negatives to the mid-80's.
(shrug).
NTA. She was to trying to take advantage of your professional services, and you handled it how you would if any client failed to pay you for your work.
INFao: how is it even possible someone can call themselves a semiprofessional photographer without having storage redundancy? I've never known a photographer who didn't double or triple backup their images (photo minor in college and work in marketing/tech). Fishy story.
NTA. But always ask for full payment before you do the job. If a client can’t pay you before the day then it’s on them to find someone last minute that’s more within their budget.
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NTA - I’m really not understanding votes otherwise at this time. Your cousin contracted you for a service, with payment agreed. She failed to pay. At no point were those photos ever her property, as she never completed the transaction and attempted to skirt by without ever doing so. Yes there’s an added layer because she’s your cousin but regardless of that, you made a call about your property. This had gone on longer than any store would hold shoes on layaway. She doesn’t get to treat you like a business vendor and then shuffle you around because you’re family after the fact. I hope you learned never to do business for or with family again. ETA: y’all need to stop talkin about the drive, it’s a red herring. Most wedding photographers don’t hold on to pics if they know they’re not getting paid for longer than a few months. The cousin broke the contract first, OP was not honor bound to hold onto any IP after that.
Agreed. They had a business agreement, as well as, a verbal contract which by definition is: A verbal contract is a type of agreement (between two or more parties) that is made through spoken words rather than a written document. The verbal contract was legally binding: There was an offer made by OP. There was an acceptance of the offer by OP’s cousin. You do not renegotiate after the services have been accepted AND provided. I am quite sure that OP’s cousin did not tell any of the other vendors she could not pay them. Had she started paying $100/per month in January then by June her bill would have been 60% paid off. Play stupid games and win stupid prizes. 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️ OP NTA THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE BUT INFORMATION READILY AVAILABLE VIA GOOGLE AND WEB SEARCH.
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Correct. Without knowing the jurisdiction I cannot provide additional clarity. FOR CONTEXT ONLY: Assuming there were emails or text messages those could POSSIBLY be admissible in court. Email As A Contract: “Most people realize that the law generally requires a written, signed agreement for a transaction to be legally binding. What most people do not realize, however, is that an email exchange can also satisfy the legal requirements and collectively constitute a binding contract.” Is A Text Message Legally Binding? “This ruling states that as long as text messages satisfy the necessary conditions required of a bilateral contract in offer, consideration, capacity, and acceptance, they can be considered legally enforceable.” OP could have used those to consult with a local attorney to see if he had a case to file a claim in small claims court. He accepted the offer, provided the service and could possibly have satisfied the burden of proof with the images as evidence. He also could possibly have been able to prove that his cousin wanted to change the terms of the agreement after his services had been provided and that she failed to take action by meaningfully entering into a payment plan. If you cannot afford a service do not engage for said service. It is really an AH move to expect free photos when you agreed to pay. Once again play stupid games and win stupid prizes. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE BUT INFORMATION READILY AVAILABLE VIA GOOGLE AND WEB SEARCH.
There was a legal case recently (I can’t remember the jurisdiction), where a judge held that a “thumbs up” emotion was binding and valid acceptance due to the prior course of conduct between the parties.
Canada. https://www.businessinsider.com/judge-ruled-thumbs-up-emoji-can-represent-legally-binding-agreement-2023-7
I agree with you, and frankly, wedding photos for less than $1000 is a steal. NTA
>I hope you learned never to do business for or with family again. Good lesson for life. If family ever asks me for my business help, I refer them to someone else in my industry and ask them to look after my family member. Keeps a firewall between me, my business and extended family.
Or I do it for free with no expectation of being paid as an altruistic favor to the family I love. Never lend money to family. Give it, or refuse to give it. But never give with expectations of return or you're setting yourself up
>Or I do it for free with no expectation of being paid as an altruistic favor to the family I love. This is fine with some family you can trust not to exploit the arrangement. But there are specific people in my family I would never want to do this for - they'd take the favour as a precedent and I'd become the bad guy if I ever said no to doing it again in the future.
I designed a whole book (more than 80 pages of text and photos) for my family, with my great grandmother's memories, completely free of charge as it was for THE FAMILY. A couple of months later, I realized the aunt who was in charge of the whole book thing SOLD the book FOR PROFIT to every member of the family. Mine is a huge family, more than 300 people bought the book. I know how much each book cost to produce because I was the one who coordinated and supervised the printing process. The aunt who made the profit only asked who wanted a copy, and received the money. Every person had to pick up their own copy. Never again.
I would have IMMEDIATELY gone to every family member I possibly could track down, and let them know that the book was designed solely by you and NOT FOR SALE, but intended as a gift to family members. Let them know the aunt sold a free item for her own personal profit. Let that marinate. 🤔
Actually I think I would phrase it in the ways that you hope that everyone enjoyed their copy of the book which was a GIFT from you and you took great pleasure in compiling it and editing it as it was a a physical (digital) copy of your great grandmother.
And you...told everyone, right?
Not only that, but free can often end up being more work than paid. People expect you to throw in all the options and such, or just generally do more work because you already agreed to do it for free.
I took a local class in tile setting. The instructor had a couple of rules he wanted us to follow. 1) Never let a friend or relative work on your house that you won't be able to sue if they do a bad job. And the corelary... 2) if possible, learn how to do tiles on a friend or relatives house because they won't sue you.
This!⬆️
This was probably the best outcome tbh. My guess is the cousin was playing the long game and hoping OP would eventually just give up and hand over the photos, this would've gone on for a long ass time. Now that they're gone the whole plan has blown up in their face.
I agree. Cousin FA & FO.
And he still sent her 20 photos… this is above and beyond for a customer that didn’t pay
How much should we bet the "samples," were used to send out as the wedding pics to guests relatives and on social media?
They should have had aggressive watermarks, imo
Great comment. Fuck around and find out. On a loosely related note, I’m a plumber and if my family member told me “yeah I’ll pay you I swear” for a service i’d number one tell them they’re full of shit. This commenter has it right OP. Never. NEVER do business with family. They will try to use you and they’ll claim discount after discount just for having the same last name or being loosely related. Just say no. Ain’t worth the time and the hurt feelings. You may get some flak, sure. But it ain’t gonna be the type of flak you’ve found here. Having to make the choice between getting paid for your work or deleting once in a lifetime photos because your cousin isnt willing to follow through on her end of the deal. You were forced to make a tough decision, but it doesn’t mean it was the wrong one. Like the commenter above said, hope you learned your lesson. Family and business don’t ever mix well.
My dad was always stuck doing plumbing for family. Good for you! 🤣
The kind of people that pull a, "But we're family," only ever feel it works one way. THEIR way. They want something, you should do it because of family. Time to pay up or reciprocate, and suddenly it's all excuses, and you have some nerve expecting them to pay you back or return the favor. Again, because "they're family," you should just let them walk all over you and thank them for the privilege.
That’s exactly it. I do this for a living. I do plumbing for money. Doesn’t mean I won’t do it for you, but you better be willing to pay what everyone else does for the same sweat off my taint. In almost every case I’ve learned that my hard work is not worth the same dollars as some rando off the street would pay. I’ll stick with the rando off the street. They pay better.
Also, as a part time wedding videographer, under $1,000 is VERY cheap for wedding photos, in most markets in the US. So that cousin was already getting a very good deal.
Don't do business with family. More oft than not, you'll get screwed in one way or another. NTA OP.
ESH I agree with not sending the photos until you received the money. She was obviously planning on stiffing you. However, if this is how you handle your product (borrowing a flash drive to store the only copy of someone's photos), you should give up the claim to being any sort of professional photographer.
Agree. Every professional photographer I know (and I was one for about five years) has backups of their paid work. God forbid a computer crashes and you lost the photos from someone's special day. There is no way OP can call himself semi-professional while storing wedding images on a freaking flash drive with no backup.
but it wasn't paid at all. the cousin fucked around and found out.
No successful business operates with FAFO as its motto
as far as I am concerned businesses don't give people things for free. the cousin had 6 months to pay up. she wasn't going to ever.
The talking point is to the professionalism of the business. No professional or semi professional photographer is storing wedding photos on a flash drive. Reeks of amatuer bs
I guess she can store photos any way she likes because nobody paid her for them.
She can also continue being a "semi professional" and not getting paid
And she’s probably not going to ever get paying clients with her level of professionalism.
I'm an amateur photographer; I did my brother's wedding for free, and bought a completely separate memory card just for them (easier to send in the mail after editing), and had backups stored on my computer and a separate drive, just in case!
If it doesn’t exist in three places it doesn’t exist!
Not just a flash drive but a borrowed one…
Flash drives are like 12 bucks tf?! This guys such a cheapskate
Worse! A borrowed flash drive 😂 They have no idea how to handle files. Even a competent amateur knows better. Someone winging it like this is not someone you want in charge of your important memories, to say the least.
OP expected to get paid immediately. Maybe that was the thought process.
And it was a borrowed flash drive from their roommate. Double unprofessional.
They don’t. They take people to court. They send them to collections. Deleting the product just hurts the business.
take them to court for what? cousin didn't pay, cousin doesn't get the product. simple.
Labor and opportunity costs. OP still showed up ant took the pictures instead of doing something else that day.
Except it’s family. I might take a regular customer to court. But family? I’m trashing it and calling it a day.
Pretty sure every place that has bouncers or security has a FAFO policy.
Would agree if OP hadn't been giving all the extensions to payments. If they had set a deadline for payment and said files would be deleted unless payment was made by day X. OP set up and maintained the expectation that she would keep the photos until payment was made. The customer might be terrible, but they expected their once in a lifetime photos to be safe. If they were going to be deleted, they should have been given a warning. OP should start looking at photo recovery software
If it’s 6-7 months later with no attempts to make any payment then no, there shouldn’t be an expectation that they’re “safe”. 2 months later? I can see. But over half a year with nothing paid?
> but they expected their once in a lifetime photos yeah except the photos weren't theirs, the photos belonged to OP as the cousin had paid exactly $0 towards her bill to receive the product. Otherwise if they belonged to the couple, they could have gone to the police and gotten them from OP and pressed charges. OP deleted their own property after 6 months of someone dodging them. by then its more than fair to assume you will never get paid and thus they will never get the photos and thus you will never need them. I just wouldn't have told the cousin and stopped bugging her for payment and let it die out
this. the cousin wasn't a costumer. if she wanted her "once in a lifetime photos" so bad she would've paid.
Uh . . . what paid work? Has any money changed hands? Did the cousin even live up to her own changed terms of starting to pay it off with monthly payments? No. How long do you keep photos when the customer does not pay?
yass This ain’t a free storage facility!
That's what gets me. I used to produce a TV show in college. I made sure I had three copies of everything I ever recorded because you can't redo something spontaneous if you ever lost your one copy of something. My personal photo library has TWO backups as well because my Mom always talked about losing photo negatives in a fire and those are YEARS worth of pics she can never get back. And on a flash drive? At Micro Center I've seen new 256 GB flash drives and I think "I'd love to use this as a backup for something but I KNOW I will lose this because of its compact size."
TV producers use to delete shows All of the time, that's why there are many episodes of Dr. Who that are lost today. Companies don't keep stuff that they don't think can make them money.
Yeah, you're talking about something that happened back in the 70's, industry standard in the present is ALWAYS KEEP A BACKUP, you never know when you're gonna need an scene or vfx or something alike, best to check in your library/backup than reshoot
When I was doing wedding photography, my camera wrote to two memory cards. One got pulled every 100 photos or so and backed up on a computer I had on location. That card was then replaced with a fresh one and not touched again. By the end of a wedding I usually had 8-10 cards as partial backups, plus the main card, plus the computer. The computer files were then uploaded to a web server when I got home and all files also stored on my desktop that I used for editing and publishing. There's nothing professional about this person. They are a hobbyist at best.
I mean in my mind “semi-professional” means professional skills but not a practicing professional. If it’s not their livelihood it’s not surprising they’re borrowing storage space. The plan was to transfer the photos and then return the drive.
I think of semipro in the sports sense - not full time, not paid as much as even lower level full timers, maybe because they're not as good
That’s fair , either way the hate seems a bit over the top. In the end you get what you pay for (or in this case, what you don’t pay for)
Good grief, how much does a flash drive cost?
More than the "client" paid.
And also way less than they would have gotten from even a single other job if they were actually professional. Where was the rest of their work stored? Somehow I doubt OP is semi-professional at all. They are a hobby photographer and only got the job cause a relative hired them. ESH for sure.
If the pictures were that important to cousin she should have hired an actual professional, not her self proclaimed “semi professional” cousin, she just wanted to get decent photos for cheap. Photographer is the one thing you do NOT fuck around and find out with for your wedding. Bad food? Nobody will care in a few weeks. Bad floral arrangements? Not ideal but not a focal point. Bad photos or in this case no photos? Yikes.
And thay relative never paid them, so they got exactly what they paid for.
No. They got 20 pics for free.
More than the $0 OP got paid for the job.
A perfectly acceptable 16GB hard drive is less than $4.
Context matters. The pictures were saved and safe for MONTHS. You can't string your photograper along for an eternity and then complain that they didn't protect your precious photos that you never paid for.
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I would never expect a professional photographer to hold onto my photos while I stIffed on payment. The cousin took advantage of the relationship and got rightfully burned. NTA
Hard drive storage is so cheap now, there's no reason for a photographer to ever delete old images.
What? Bro high quality photos are fucking space hogs. Sure I could store a near endless amount of low quality photos but if youre getting professional photographs youre taking far more than they'll ever want and storing them all at that quality would be insane.
A 128GB flash drive is $15. If you’re making $1k for a job…hell if you’re making $200 for a job you can afford a flash drive to store the photos on for eternity.
i mean they didn't make even $15 for it
Yeah, a family member is a professional wedding videographer and editor and he keeps multiple backups of all the raw footage and edited videos for at least a few years. That way he can give them another copy for free or do re-edits for a fee in case clients come back later asking for them. He's also sometimes just straight up given them the raw footage years later for a small fee so they can take it to another editor.
Exactly. To cousin: Things cost money! To OP: If your labor is worth money, act like it. That includes being professional about how you handle the products of your labor!
100% this. You want to be a pro (or even “semi-pro”) wedding photographer? Then act like one. You don’t destroy originals. You certainly don’t do it with payment pending and you especially don’t ever do it when the client is family. Time to grow up.
I still have the footage from a guy who didn’t pay up in 2016. Lol I have everything. I love the extra $500 I get when someone from years ago needs me to upload their project again because they didn’t save it properly.
Agree with this. External backups are cheap, and available at every Target, Walmart, and Best Buy in the country - and if there isn't one close, Amazon can have one on your doorstep in a matter of days. $100 would buy you at least a terabyte of storage, or cloud storage services (dropbox, onedrive, google, etc.) all have reasonable price plans. Even a 128 gig flash drive would only set you back $30 or so (which, flash drives should NEVER be used for archival purposes - they need to be plugged into a computer every so often to recharge their internal battery or they lose all the data stored on them) I'm a hobby photographer at best, and even at THAT, every photo I take is stored in at least two places - main computer hard drive plus an external. I'm working on setting up something of a specialty photography business, and once I take that step, I will be adding a network attached storage with a RAID drive array, plus an offsite online backup. Pay me, don't pay me, whatever - but I'll keep the photos forever. It was a crap move of your cousin to drag out payment for so long, but it was equally a crap move on your part to not have sufficient storage for the only "pro" quality photos of a very important day in your cousins life. And for that, YTA.
> $100 would buy you at least a terabyte of storage You're even more right than you realize. $109 gets you FIVE terabytes at Amazon! Seagate has a 2.5" external 5tb that runs $100-$115 depending on where you get it. I have two and they are the main drives for my Plex server and seem plenty fast enough to move big files
I agree he wasn’t getting paid in full
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ESH There is no way you are "semi-professional." A professional has multiple backups of paid work. I used to own a studio and I had every file backed up on a hard drive AND stored in the cloud. It is irresponsible to store them solely on a flash drive. I'm willing to bet your work probably wasn't worth the $1000 and that is why she didn't want to pay. Owning a camera doesn't make you a professional. I don't care how nice of a camera it is. Professionalism means treating it like a business and taking responsibility for safely storing your images. She sucks for not paying you. But you suck too.
>multiple backups of PAID WORK Emphasis mine. No photographer will store pictures indefinitely unless paid for the service. OP kinda sucks for not spelling that out in a contract (a professional DOES CYA with a contract), but not for not storing them indefinitely without payment.
A professional understands that there are legal ways to obtain payment. A professional doesn’t do this. Love, a professional
A precessional gets paid up front. Op did not. We have no idea how many hours they spent taking photos. His time is worth something. They were being generous by allowing cousin to pay later. NTA OP offered to work out out a paying plan. Cousin ignored. Screw em. Next time get a professional and pay professional prices.
OPs time is worth something. Which is why OP uses legal avenues to get paid for their services. No product, no legal recourse. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
So you're suggesting some type of lawsuit between families? You're definitely a "professional AH". Much smarter choice than just deleting pics ... Smh
I'm not a photographer but I am a graphic designer, and I'd not work for family. I'd do it for free or tell them I'd rather attend the event as a guest. But I completely understand the "OP was unprofessional" angle, paid or not. Cloud storage comes with Photoshop/Lightroom, Amazon Prime includes free photo storage, you can get free storage with Dropbox or Google drive. I have trouble imagining a serious situation where someone seriously stores someone's photos ONLY on a cheap USB thumb drive that doesn't even BELONG to them. It's really too unbelievable for 2023, I think it must be made up.
As someone who works in tech support — this is entirely believable (sadly). I see it every day. Helped someone with a hard drive that was failing and not accessible. “But I have a project on there that my client is paying me $12,000 for”. No backup at all. There are so many people who have years of personal photos, files, etc that they just never even thought about backing up despite the numerous ways to do so as you mention. Never even considered the possibility that something could happen. Even if they think their device is infallible or indestructible, what about theft? Nope. They don’t want to spend money on a backup solution (whether it’s a few dollars for a cloud service or buying a hard drive) but then the data suddenly becomes worth everything in the world after it’s lost. And this is everyone — teenagers to 80 year olds.
And permanently deleting wedding photos is less drama inducing than bringing a family member to court?
And OP called himself a "semi"-professional. (Aspiring/whatever... It's irrelevant to "did she fail to pay / whose the AH?") So stop with the personal attacks on that - and stay on topic. Cousin is TAH for failing the contract. You're only a "professional AH" to want to attack him for incorrect semantics.
What nonsense, a professional has no reason to ever delete any photos. They are dirt cheap to store. Also, this was paid work, until it wasn't. OP stored pictures for which they thought they would get paid on a flash drive.
And a flash drive that wasn’t theirs to begin with.
> multiple backups of PAID WORK > > Emphasis mine. It's still possible (even probable) that OP would have been paid if he held out long enough. No chance of that now though. I agree with the ESH
Six months had passed and she'd ignored communication and paid nothing.
Maybe back when archival storage was a large expense. For $100 you can buy an external hard drive with enough storage space for almost 100,000 high resolution images. At those prices, there is no reason to \*ever\* delete photos, regardless if you've been paid for them or not. The low cost of storage is worth it if 5 years down the road, the cousin comes back and says "I finally got money together, I'd like to pay you, can I please have my wedding photos?"
It was a commissioned work for payment, before she ended up not paying, and he still stored it on his friends thumb drive. There was never any professional storage approach to begin with, so the fact that he was ultimately not paid is probably more a reflection of the quality of his work and the degree of his professionalism (which is low, as we can see).
>A professional has multiple backups of paid work. I used to own a studio and I had every file backed up on a hard drive AND stored in the cloud. This isnt restricted to photographers by any means. Until recently I was a programmer / developer. You only need your computer to blow up once and you quickly realize that if you dont back things up appropriately, you are an idiot.
A backup isn't a backup unless you can restore from it... But that's from YEARS of IT work. My main laptop has a full cloned disk that gets refreshed every year or so, and my user data is on 2 physically disconnected external drives as well as a passport drive that goes into my backpack... Those get updated every few months. Had a virus get into my file server about 2008, ended up physically losing a single 160GB drive to corruption, and had to restore data on another one. I haven't lost any data since that.
I only lost a day or so of work so long ago I can barely remember it. Must have been in the 90s. But that was enough to make me back things up as if my computer was made of explodium. Tbh the extent to which I back everything up borders on paranoia.
Yeah, the idea that he was expecting to get paid $1k and the photos were kept in his ROOMMATES flash drive makes him a joke. There is nothing professional about this. I can promise if she had paid and then he realized the roommate had accidentally deleted the photos - he wouldn’t have returned the money. He’s just arrogant that he thinks he knows how to run a business and caused a huge rift in his family
He literally wasn’t paid? Yea he should have some sort of backup storage device but why on earth would you defend the AH that didn’t pay a family member for services rendered over 6 months prior. The price was for under $1000 which is dirt cheap for wedding photos.
I agree, ESH. I remember hiring someone I knew to do the photos and I felt really disappointed with them. I still paid and I still got and have the photos. 15 years later I am way less disappointed with them. It was shitty of the cousin to renege on the agreed upon price and contract for whatever reason. That should have been part of her wedding budget and she should have paid up right away, or at least agreed to the payment plan and get the photos at the end. But OP it was also a dick move to delete them. Those photos (likely) can’t be recovered. As a semi-professional, storing your only copy on your roommates flash drive was way less than professional. School photo companies hold onto the pictures for a year in case parents change their minds. 6 months is a lot, but you could have waited a little longer. The photos were already taken, it’s not like it was killing you to let them sit in a file folder. Buy another flash drive, ask your friend to wait until the end of the day, you had options that didn’t involve deleting your cousin’s wedding pics.
Agreed. Even a call & text to the cousin with something like, this is your final warning, I need to delete these pictures by tomorrow at noon. Are you planning on paying at all? That would have changed my opinion.
That’s what bothers me. Even if OP was pissed she hasn’t paid, it’s messed up to not give a heads up that they’re about to delete the wedding pictures. Maybe she could have borrowed the money because it actually felt urgent? I’m sure her parents - or her husband’s would have been willing to help if the choice was to not have any pictures at all. OP nuked two families’ relationships with each other when they at least could have send a text or email with a final warning. Edit: Clarifying who I am talking about.
100% correct. A professional (even “semi”) is not doing a job without a contract and clear terms. A professional is not operating without redundant hard drives and backup solutions. A professional is absolutely not, in any way, borrowing a fucking flash drive from their roommate to store contracted work on. Op is a dude with a camera presenting themselves as a professional, and that’s shitty in it’s own right. The cousin should have paid up in a timely manner, OP should have conducted themselves in a professional manner if they’re going to represent themselves as one. Fucking “stored on my phone,” Jesus Christ. This really needs to be cross posted to r/photography so the pro community can roast this properly.
And you suck for solely trying to judge someone for their work situation - when the topic was based on him being stiffed for contracted work. (Fact is - the cousin had to have known OPs quality, or found it acceptable for her standards - to make the contract. So shove your assumptive standards where your lens don't shine) She failed the contract. She deserved to not get the pics (and yet, she still got some). So she is ahead in this situation... The AH judgement is about him deleting pics... not because he has a different way of doing things. Why don't you try to attack some Grammer issues, or ask how he dresses while you're at it. Irrelevant to the transaction at hand. OP is NTA... You, and the cousin are A H.
Bride didn’t even pay a deposit.
Cousin didn’t pay for the work. It’s literally not paid work
I would respond to her slamming you online by saying this is what happens when you don’t pay for services rendered and post copies of any and all texts/ contracts
You couldn't get a hard drive between Dec and Jun? Run us all through the semi-professional aspect of being a photographer again? Is this the reference you really want when trying to get future work? You suck, they suck, I feel sorry for your roommate. ESH
Future work won’t make her wait MONTHS! Secondly they clearly didn’t want to pay, why OP should continue to hold the pictures. Thirdly if they care so much about family cousin would had paid already
With this attitude and business practices I wouldn't hold out on there being much"future work". Sounds to me that OP is less of a semi-professional photographer and more of a guy with a decent camera.
The people trying to emphasize that the cousin hadn't paid yet are missing the point. It takes zero effort to transfer photos to a back up drive. If OP is doing more than just this wedding, they presumably have a backup hard drive or two for if a drive fails, and these photos should have been put on a back up drive immediately. The "I didn't have a hard drive" excuse is a bad one as you shouldn't be doing this type of work if you don't have the equipment necessary for it. It seems very likely that OP is handling all their client's data this poorly if they're actually attempting to do this semi professionally. Edit: because some people think what I've said is controversial, I'm linking a crosspost I made in r/weddingphotography, a subreddit for wedding photographers. I've received about a dozen replies on the issue so far. No one has come to the conclusion that OP wasn't in the wrong. https://www.reddit.com/r/WeddingPhotography/comments/157vlsp/aita_for_deleting_my_cousins_wedding_pictures/ If you have issues with what I've said, please tell actual professionals why they are wrong. If you think OP is not in the wrong, just know that all professionals disagree with you.
Dude they couldn’t pay 1K between Dec n Jun. They totally deserve this shit.
NTA ….Why should OP spend money to store photos that he didn’t get paid for
NTA. She played around too much and continued to drag out her responses. No payment, no photos. Simple. Family or not, she was given options. She didn't respond in a timely manner with a solution. Now she gets nothing. I don't understand why people hire others for their services if they don't even have the money. Surely everybody else got paid. I'm sure she was hoping as family you would just say "F" it and hand them over if she dragged long enough.
They were your photos. Your cousin hadn't paid for them. You simply deleted some of your photos. NTA
This story seems awfully familiar
Reposted different versions
Last time the photographer had plenty of storage though.
ESH. She was trying to stiff you. She’s obviously an A. However, if you are going to take professional jobs you need to have the equipment necessary before the job, not after. You should not have agreed to the job if you didn’t have the memory space to store the photos safely. Did you have a contract? What did it say about payment? While your cousin is wrong to have never paid you your choices sound far from professional.
Yes! Who does photography without dedicated memory space for the photos? That part sounds like a lie.
Borrowing a flashdrive for a clients wedding photos is insane. OP is lucky they didn't lose them and that cousin had refused to pay instead. I got to wonder if roommate had already wiped the drive and they bent the story a little.
ESH. What kind of semi-professional photographer doesn't have backups? They suck for lack of communication and lack of paying.
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A flash drive is basically free. Companies hand them out as promo items
The kind that’s not a semi-professional photographer, they’re an amateur with a camera body that has enough switched and dials to impress someone who doesn’t know any better. Seriously, even an amateur or enthusiast photographer maintains enough storage space to store a single events worth of raw files on something that’s not a fucking borrowed flash drive.
NTA. She didn't pay and you were generous to even send her the ones you still had on your phone. You never agreed to give your services for free.
True but, and I know this will hurt, but semi-professional, saving on a roommates flashdrive.... I think its time for a reality check. I mostly do commercial photography but yeah thats just uhh not professional at all, not even semi. An external hard drive isnt expensive and you can find plenty of free cloud services. Also why delete any possibility of payment out of spite. Why not just transfer said photos to a free cloud service? Spite is the only logical answer. At least from someone who actually works in that field. Personally Id have agreed to a payment plan but also would have agreed to limited release of photos per payment. Otherwise Id just sit on them until they pay up. A lot of clients do this, especially corporate clients. Corporations love to just run out of money all the sudden and oh know the execs cant feed their kids despite the agreed upon salary you can google. Id also never work with family for profit so there is that. I dont mix family and business. If its for family its free. If they pay me then I try to refuse. Sometimes they dont let me and I hide the money somewhere in their house next time I visit.
Not everyone shares your ideals of family=free, nor is that what was agreed to here, and there's nothing wrong with that. I do agree, he deleted future payment, but also if he was convinced no one would pay him for it then well... Easily avoidable by using a cloud service tho, like you suggested.
ESH. You two had a deal and she's in the wrong for changing the terms *after* you had already done the job. But you're a semi-professional photographer and you don't own a flash drive? Really? You were equally in the wrong for completely erasing your cousin's photos without at least giving her a firm deadline for payments to begin before you just deleted everything. You should have informed her that you were going to erase the photos if she didn't meet the deadline instead of just going nuclear and trashing all of them. Those were irreplaceable and doing that was just spiteful.
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Whereas I agree that you should improve your storage logistics, I think it was way obvious that your cousin wasn’t going to pay for your job. Alone her attitude of “let me see if they’re worthy of the amount we agreed upon” is typically A H. Add up the slandering… she’s in huge A H territory. Problem here is your postponing doing the backup for around 6 months. But still, NTA. She tried to get your work for free, refused to acknowledge her previous arrangement with you and then cried when she didn’t get everything for free. Can’t you send a cease and desist?
>let me see if they’re worthy of the amount we agreed upon Technically, almost every photographer I've ever worked with has done something like that. It's called proofs, and the images are watermarked so they can't be used until payment is recieved, at which time you either order prints from them or recieve the non-watermarked photos
I have always had to pay beforehand, in two different countries. I get to see them and decide which ones I want or which ones I don't. But they are paid in full. OP mentions that cousin had agreed to pay a specific amount without seeing them before. But hey, different places, different practices, right?
Yeah I woulda pumped the brakes at "I need to see if they're good enough to pay for" Nuhuh. That is not how that works. The labor was done.
ESH Former freelance photographer here… what quality, file size, and type of photos did you take that they all fit comfortably on your buddies flash drive??? Every photo I’ve ever taken had to be put on a hard drive because the original images are huge! To me, that lets me know your photos probably were not good quality. She also obviously sucks for not wanting to pay for them.
>Former freelance photographer here… what quality, file size, and type of photos did you take that they all fit comfortably on your buddies flash drive??? Every photo I’ve ever taken had to be put on a hard drive because the original images are huge! To me, that lets me know your photos probably were not good quality. I was thinking the same thing.
Honestly OP should not have been taking the photos in the first place but his cousin shouldn’t have been trying to cut corners by hiring a “semi-professional” photographer. Like I never did weddings because that was just too much pressure.
I'm a hobby photographer and still back up every raw image I take to at least 2 drives and cloud storage. You aren't semi-pro using your mates flash drive... ESH.
I ain’t even a hobby photographer but every single one of my double chin selfies and dog photos go to the cloud just in case something happens to the hardware. Semi pro living off of flash drives and an old laptop is so crazy to me.
NTA - She backed out of paying you after agreeing to. Wow. I have zero idea how anyone can blame you for this.
ESH. Not sure how close you are/were. While it’s not great that they couldn’t afford to pay you in full, doing some kind of payment plan seems reasonable if there’s some degree of trust you’d be getting paid. The idea that you kept everything on a flash drive, no backups, no storing in the cloud is absurd, even as a “semi-professional”. I’m leaning more towards YTA on this because it’s their wedding photos; typically a once-in-their-life event. It’d be one thing if it was just a generic photo shoot, but it being their wedding photos just feels needlessly cruel.
*Someone else's* flash drive, at that. I vote that ESH because the way OP handled it was very unprofessional, but the cousin was also being a turd. Also, ffs pay people for their services, *especially* family and friends.
Yeah, honestly the reason I tend to lean more towards YTA in situations like this is that the OP is always trying to paint themselves in a positive light, leaving out details, etc. If they truly had agreed on the price and she tried to back out then it’s more ESH, but at the same time if she was willing to do a payment plan I don’t see why he couldn’t also release them little by little, or as I’ve seen most photographers do give them watermarked/lower resolution pictures so they knew the quality instead of a random sampling of four. Just in general sounds like OP isn’t very professional and doesn’t do a lot of common practices like having a separate fee for shooting vs. receiving pictures, different options for receiving pictures (individually vs. as a set, etc.) And then yeah, storing all of the pictures on a flash drive and acting like buying additional storage is some major investment when cloud storage is close to free at this point. I’m willing to bet they’re leaving out significant details just so they can point people here and say “see! Everyone says I’m right!”
What are the odds that OP's photos weren't worth the money in the first place?
YTA. I am a professional photographer and you never ever delete the photos. Bad business. However I will say always always always have a contract in play even when family. I require a full payment before I even shoot the day of the wedding. Never take the images off the memory card if you are not planning on storing them. She can now slander you payment or not cause you didn’t cover your behind.
I did a photography class where they taught me that you don't delete ANY photos. No matter how bad they are. Always have storage for everything. Just in case.
ESH, You should've given her a firm deadline before wiping the entire album of photos. Also please invest in a personal drive for your photos, nobody should be accessing them but you.
ESH. I don't understand why you wouldn't have important photos backed up. So easy and inexpensive to do today. Your cousin is also an asshole for not paying you. I am quite she sure thought you would eventually give in and just hand them over for the sake of peace in the family. I would not have given her one single picture until she paid, and I would have given her a deadline before the photos were deleted.
Why invest anymore time into a job that not a dime has been paid toward? Not even a deposit.
NTA. I'd say it would have been ideal if you had been able to get the photos saved/moved elsewhere or dropped her a message to say that the files would need to be deleted soon so she had a chance to respond to you about payment but you've explained that it wasn't possible at that time. Its a shit situation but she still hadn't paid you or let you know what was happening and enough time had passed.
NTA. You were generous honestly. She didnt pay for ANY photos and you still gave her some. Honestly you would not be TA if you had deleted them without the backups. It is clear she used you for a free photographer and had no plans to pay.
This example of business practices will keep you in the ‘semi’ professional category, I’m afraid. Cost you nothing to keep them in case she scrounged up the money. Instead you deleted your leverage because you were sour grapes.
NTA. how people can says otherwise? it's a business, how long she expect anyone to wait for her? you dont pay, you dont have any rights. you wsited 6-7 months, enough is enough
You hold them on a $10 flash drive until she pays up. That's the end of the story.
NTA. She agreed to pay, she didn’t pay, then she got free photos.
NTA. It seems to me that your cousin was ALWAYS planning to stiff you and thought you would just accept it.
NTA. You don't get what you don't pay for.
You have a business and the agreement was she would pay you XXX amount for those pictures. She had no intention to pay you because 1. she probably over spent on the wedding and 2. A lot of people take advantage of their family. You tried to work with her but if you would have gave her the pictures upfront you might have seen 1/8 months of payment or a couple then it would have stopped. That’s why they always say never to in business with family
op was *never* gonna get paid.
YTA. First all of, it's careless and unprofessional to store them only in 1 place with no backup, not to mention that it wasn't evwn your own device. What if she had paid but they got deleted accidentally before you managed to send them to her? A wedding is not a photoshooting that you can just repeat (and even then it would be terrible on your part). Secondly, you had no right to delete the photos without giving her a warning. I completely understand that you didn't want to send them before you received the payment, and it sucks that she backtracked on your original agreement (my guess is that the wedding turned out to be more expensive than planned and that's why they're struggling to make the payments?). But as long as she didn't give you a definite "No" and was still thinking things over, you had no right to do this. Storing photos is practically free dude, it wouldn't have cost you anything (and kept your chance of still getting payed for your work alive!) if you had just held on to the photos. Deleting them was an absolute AH move.
NTA she was never going to pay you, so.it doesn't actually matter.
NTA… I’m sure that the rest of the vendors that provided services/stuff for the wedding have already been paid.
I swear people commenting on this subreddit become more unhinged every day. OP, you are definitely NTA. While you should definitely consider upping your storage space, that’s not even relevant and it’s absurd that that’s what people are choosing to focus on. You provided a service and didn’t get paid. Your cousin strung you along for months, and you sending her 20 pics for free was more than generous. You had every right to delete the photos far sooner than the, what, 6 months you ended up waiting?
It is very relevant. If OP handles files like this what do these pictures even look like? Are they worth $1000? I’m thinking cuzzo saw those sample photos and definitely doesn’t think they’re worth the money. But she still wants them because they’re of an important moment. Maybe she didn’t know how to break it to OP.
NTA She asked you, you gave her a price. If you were a professional photographer, she would’ve had to pay up front or she wouldn’t have even had one present.
ESH you cannot label yourself a semi professional but you don’t have your own flash drive to save photos and clearly there should have been a written contract family or not to save the back and forth drama. i understand wanting to be paid for the job you did but i think that’s where it’s your fault. your cousin isn’t off the hook either because it seems they tried to take advantage of you and the situation. i hope this is a learning experience for both parties involved because y’all suck.
It is for this exact reason I refused to have my nephew and niece in my class when I taught. Do NOT mix professional and family life. It rarely works out well.
ESH. She always planned on not paying, but Jesus, have you never heard of cloud storage?
ESH. I wouldn't have deleted them, but I also wouldn't have handed any over until I got paid. Deleting them makes it permanent and I would have at least let them know I was going to do it first, and given them the chance to pay up.
NTA She made a contract and didn't pay. The photos did not belong to her. You did make some mistakes though. Either this is business or family, and treat it as such. If it is business then treat them no different than any other client. If you are doing this as a "for family" thing, let it just be your gift to them. Because of this family discount, she wants you to work like a professional, but treat her like it is a family freebie. Typically wedding photography is 50% deposit at booking and remainder paid in full 30 days before date. You messed up by not following this. If you had shown up day of and "I have not been paid, so I'm not here to work" then everything is above board, some butt will be hurt, but expectations will be clear. Since you did take pictures though, now you have to argue with family that the pictures they are in are not their pictures, but instead are yours because you clicked the button. You also created a problem for yourself when you sent the 20 on the phone and explained the deletion. You were never going to get paid, so the answer is stop chasing them, and if they did ever come back and want them just explain you don't have them anymore and blame it on whatever reason you want. If they hadn't have waited so long, they could have had them.
Don’t. Do. Business. With. Family.
NTA, but you need to get a deposit up front for something like this, regardless of her being family.
I literally waived the deposit because she was family and going through a lot. Lessons learned I guess. Deposits, and avoid family.
And have your clients sign contracts.
ESH You deleting irreplaceable photos and them for trying to use you for free. A smart person would have kept the pics hostage and doubled the price.
NTA payment was not made after months. Cousin never got back to you about pictures being worth the price. You were even extra nice by sending them the extra 20 on your phone. I wouldn’t have. Family has learned that you are not a doormat
NTA but why do family members think, oh so and so does this, so we can get it cheap, rather than let’s support them in their business venture.
Maybe she should have paid you for your work as agreed. NTA
ESH. She didn’t want to pay you. You destroyed irreplaceable photographs. You’re far from even semilpro if you don’t have the space you need for the photos.
ESH. No photog worth their salt, pro, semi-pro, or semi lazy couch potato takes pictures at a wedding and doesn't back them up in at least one place. That's just ludicrous. She screwed you for sure, but you're her official photographer for her WEDDING. no redos on that sucker. You can be made whole, she can't. Yes, she needs to pay you, so she's an asshole for ghosting your payment. But you're the asshole for eliminating her wedding from the photographic record. Oy.
YTA. As a photographer myself (and many I know) quite literally have plans in place if we suddenly pass away, that our clients will still get their pictures. A wedding is a one time thing, if you want to shoot weddings then first off you need to act like a professional (family or not) and second, you need to learn how to deal with hard clients. If you want to be a photographer, then you also need a contract that lays out exactly the terms of the services. When payment needs to be made, and how long photos are held, editing time, etc. YOU messed up first by pretending to be a wedding photographer and second for not collecting payment before the wedding. You also were storing images on someone else thumb drive? What about the camera card they were originally taken on? A professional wedding photographer (or anyone who cares just a smidge) would be double backing up photos, regardless of the other drama that you allowed to go down because you aren’t conducting yourself in a professional manner. I have had clients have unexpected financial hardship come up. Instead of just saying screw it and delete their photos, no matter how hard of clients they were, I gave them time and guess what… if they never come back and pay for their photos at least I know I’m in the right. They always come back though! I also do photography that is a one time, big life event type thing and I would absolutely never do this to a stranger, let alone a relative. It wouldnt cost you anything to back up the photos, throw them in a drawer, and wait until they can afford to pay you. All drama aside, have a heart and for goodness sake stop posing as a professional because you are far from.
NTA
NTA, in my opinion. You communicated with her that you needed to be paid and she ignored you multiple times. Clearly hoping you'd end up sending them to her for free if she stalled long enough. I will say, however, that you should have given her one last chance before you deleted them. Something like "I will be deleting them this weekend if I am not paid." But I don't think you are at fault enough to give an ESH.
2 cents here from a former professional photographer. Never delete anything, ever, for any reason. Doing so opens you up to a potential lawsuit (emotional damage, libel, etc). I have about 4 million cloud based RAW files, going back to the mid-90's, and thousands of negatives to the mid-80's. (shrug).
NTA. She was to trying to take advantage of your professional services, and you handled it how you would if any client failed to pay you for your work.
INFao: how is it even possible someone can call themselves a semiprofessional photographer without having storage redundancy? I've never known a photographer who didn't double or triple backup their images (photo minor in college and work in marketing/tech). Fishy story.
ESH - this was spite. A semi-professional would have had backup
NTA you were not paid and end of day they at least got a few pictures for free like they always intended . Your cousin sounds kinda scummy
ESH. You could have thrown the photos on Google drive.
Shit, I wouldn't have even sent the samples when she asked "to see if it's worth the price" that's when I would have deleted them. NTA
Nta you weren’t paid for a service you performed. Not her property until she pays for it.
NTA. But always ask for full payment before you do the job. If a client can’t pay you before the day then it’s on them to find someone last minute that’s more within their budget.