We’ve all heard a story about it. Or worse: it’s happened to you.

A tale as old as time: a photographer promises you the world and says whatever you want to hear. But as soon as you sign your name on the dotted line, they become a completely different person and/or ghost you after your wedding.

And then begins the game of cat and mouse afterwards. A month passes; you ask where your pictures are. They say you will get them “soon.” Three more months pass, and “soon” never comes. You endlessly call/email them to no avail. With each attempt at contact, your regret in hiring them only worsens.

If you’re lucky, you might still get your pictures back eventually. Some never get them at all. But even if you get them back, and even if they came out well, the experience has been watered down from the gauntlet you completed just to get them.

Point blank: it’s unprofessional and rude. And yes, it still happens. You did your part as a client and paid them. In return, they didn’t give you the same form of respect to your time. Or in the worst of cases, they take your money and don’t give them back to you at all.

I actually have clients who paid their photographers thousands and never got them. And they never ended up fighting them. So, their photographers more or less committed theft, and got away with it.

Case in point: I have a friend who got married in the late 2000s. The photographer yanked his chain for a year saying they’ll be done “soon.”

By pure chance, near their anniversary, he ran into her at the grocery store. Even with this encounter, and with all of the time that has passed, she still had the audacity to tell him he’d get them “soon.”

This time, he didn’t take that for an answer. So, he drove to her studio with her and got the RAW files for himself. All those months later, and she hadn’t even started working on them. It’s safe to say, he did not go out of his way to recommend her.

So what helps to avoid this?

A short answer is to look for reviews. A more detailed answer is learning how to read them properly.

In nearly every story I’ve read regarding photographers who do this, they purposely hide their online presence. One I saw recently even went as far as taking down all of her social media pages. Google, Facebook, her website, everything. If you searched her name on Google, all of the links to her pages were broken. As she was getting a plethora of bad reviews for ghosting her clients, she took everything down and went under a pseudonym to continue her acts of grifting.

Something else worth noting: certain sites like The Knot and Weddingwire allow the removal of bad reviews. As a result, you do not want your only source of testimonials from a photographer to be from one of those websites. If they have no presence on Google/Yelp, that alone can be a red flag.

In this day and age, any business that wants to be successful is everywhere online. It’s exposure, and exposure means money. Even when I was new with no reviews, creating those pages is one of the first things I did.

The next part is filtering them…good reviews are nice, but for this type of scenario, you want to see the bad ones, if any. So use the feature to filter to “lowest rated.”

And the final part is discerning them.

One of my mentors has been photographing clients in Los Angeles for over 25 years. It goes without saying: she’s exceptional at what she does. As a result, she has hundreds of 5-star reviews. But also a minuscule amount of bad ones, which almost every business gets eventually.

But since she thoroughly explained her side below the bad ones, and since 99.9% of her reviews are good among the few hundred she has, most if not all people who read the bad ones will likely assume that the client was at fault. (And in this particular scenario, her client absolutely was in the wrong.)

On the flip side, if you find a photographer with a dozen 1-star reviews all stating they ghosted them…well, there’s definitely some truth there. Because with strength in numbers and the similarity of their complaints, they corroborate each other. So, a potential client reading those will (hopefully) run for the hills. They were warned.

Lastly…contracts, contracts, contracts. Make sure a clearly-established timeline is outlined for the delivery and timeline of your pictures. Should it ever come to a point where you need to take legal action, a contract is what holds up in court. A good one can protect both the company and the client, not just the former.

There are many photographers out there, so make sure to read them thoroughly. And if something feels off, wait before you sign. Talk to other photographers…because again, the first one handing you that contract is not the only one available. Consultations are free, so sometimes getting an extra one if you feel something is off can make all the difference in capturing the best day of your life.