More importantly, with great warmth I can vividly FEEL those moments of overwhelming love from our loved ones as we entered the reception. Never in my life have I felt such support, genuine happiness for us and an outwardly approval of what we were doing than on that day.
Those parts I remember to this day. The rest of what I don't remember was delivered to us in an online gallery, to which I have NO idea where I would find that if it even exists. That deliverable of my wedding is long lost. That's ALL we got because that was what was done and was the baseline - a shoot and burn type mentality with zero tangibility. We had no idea. We weren't photographers then like we are now. We knew better than most, sure, because I grew up developing and printing in the darkroom but wedding photography was foreign to me.
I really had no insight. We didn't have the perspective to know what would be valuable to us or what would do our wedding justice in 5, 10, 50 years down the road. A CD would be great and we'll definitely use that later on in life -- which was a lie. That's what we told ourselves. Again, it wouldn't be true. That was before even considering the longevity of the medium, which was a CD of photos. CD drives don't exist on my computers! But sure, we could take those files & make a cheap book ourselves online knowing it wouldn't survive long enough to meet our child's eyes.