About your older films

Nothing was deleted. Not your film, not your photographs, not anybody’s. If you have been told otherwise, it is not true.

Your photograph galleries are exactly where they were, on SmugMug, and we are not removing them.

Your film was moved, not erased. It sits in our archive and we can go and get it.

For fifteen years we delivered films through Vimeo, which was the professional standard for studios like ours. Vimeo caps how much each channel can hold, and we film enough weddings to fill one every two or three years — so keeping the old links alive meant continuing to pay for every channel we had ever opened. At the peak we were carrying five or six of them, at roughly $1,500 to $2,000 each, per year, mostly holding weddings delivered three, four, five years earlier.

In 2025 Vimeo was acquired by a company called Bending Spoons, and the pricing changed again. Then came the part that forced our hand: Vimeo made clear that if we did not deal with the storage and billing, content could be removed or become inaccessible.

We were not willing to let years of weddings quietly disappear. So we moved fast and paid an outside team to go through every older channel, download the films, organise them and move them onto Google Drive and other long-term storage — and only then closed those channels. That cost us money we had not planned to spend. We think it was the right call, and we would make it again.

Our contract makes us responsible for keeping your finished footage for six months after delivery. Permanent or lifetime hosting was never part of the package, and never something we promised.

That is the agreement. It is not what we actually did. We held on to almost everybody’s work for years past that six months, and spent thousands of dollars a year keeping films streaming long after any obligation had ended, because it felt like the right thing to do for the families we had filmed.

We are not raising the contract to wave it at you. We are raising it because the honest position is this: we could have said “your six months passed” and let the films go. We chose to spend money keeping them instead.

Before making any of these changes we took both legal counsel and halachic guidance, and were advised that closing the old channels, moving the films into other storage and charging a reasonable retrieval fee beyond the contractual period were all within our rights.

It is not that photographs matter less. It is that they live on a different service. Our galleries are hosted with SmugMug, which gives us effectively unlimited storage for one modest fee however much we put there — so we still hold galleries going back to around 2014, more than twelve years of them, and we are not removing them.

Video never worked that way. Every channel filled, every channel cost, and the bill grew every year whether anybody watched or not.

This is not a second charge for your film. You paid for the filming, the editing and the delivery, and that stands. If you downloaded your copy at the time, you never need us again.

We get four or five of these requests a day. Each one means working out which of the old channels the wedding was on, finding the right files among thousands, checking everything came across intact, organising it, building you new links and explaining what to do next. Handled free, that is not a favour squeezed between other jobs — it is most of somebody’s week, permanently.

It also covers something you never paid for: the years of storage since. Keeping film online is expensive, and we carried that bill at our own cost long after our contract asked us to — thousands of dollars a year, for weddings delivered half a decade ago — and then paid again to have everything rescued off Vimeo and preserved. The fee helps offset that, so your simcha was kept safe on our dime until the day you came back for it.

Five steps, and you are not asked for anything until we can tell you exactly what we are holding.

A lot of people have said they were never told, and they are right. In an ideal world we would have written to every family individually and given everybody months to download their films before anything moved.

We did not have that time. The films were at risk of becoming inaccessible and we had to act. Given the choice between moving fast and keeping everything, or moving slowly and losing some of it, we moved fast — but we accept the communication should have been better, and we have changed the portal so the storage period and your own copy are far more visible from now on.

We are gradually rotating older films off streaming, including 2023 and 2024, so that we run one channel instead of six. If your links still work today, download them now. Do not assume a link will be there forever.

Save the original files somewhere you control — your computer, an external drive, and ideally a cloud backup as well. The same goes for your photographs, even though those galleries are staying put and cost you nothing.

No family should have one website as the only place their memories exist. Companies get sold, prices change, policies change, technology fails. Your own copy is the one nobody can take away.