78 wedding reviews, gone overnight.

This isn't a planning tip. It's a warning shot, and it happened to us — so it's worth writing down while it's fresh, because the lesson in it is one every couple booking a wedding photographer should be handed before they compare a single quote.

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01What happened

Our Facebook page is gone. Not suspended, not restricted — removed, by an automated enforcement decision, with the appeal producing the same automated answer. No human, no explanation specific enough to act on, no route back.

I'm not going to litigate whether the decision was right, because I can't: nobody has told us what the finding was. What I can tell you is what it took with it, since that part is measurable.

02What was actually lost

Seventy-eight reviews. An average of 4.9, with 98% of the couples who left one saying they'd recommend us. That's not a marketing number — it's eighteen wedding seasons, one Saturday at a time, since 2008. You cannot rebuild it, because the couples who wrote those words got married years ago and have long since moved on with their lives.

Gone with it: the enquiry threads, the comment history, the photos couples had tagged themselves in, the small pile of goodwill that a local business accumulates by being around for a long time and not letting people down.

Here's the part that matters most, though, and the reason this is a bad week rather than a catastrophe: no client's wedding photographs were on that page. They never have been. Every wedding we've shot lives on our own storage and is delivered directly to the couple. What Meta deleted wasn't the work. It was the proof of the work.

The pictures were never on Facebook. The proof was.Jody Nesbitt · Shine Pics

03What survived

228 reviews, all of them still sitting on platforms that nobody at Shine Pics controls and Meta can't touch:

Revi — 114 reviews, 5.0. Reviews.io — 71 reviews, 5.0. Chamber of Commerce — 22 reviews, 5.0. Google — 21 reviews, 5.0.

I'd love to claim that spreading them out was strategy. It wasn't. Different review tools came and went across eighteen years, and reviews accumulated wherever we happened to be asking at the time. Pure accident — and it's the only reason a page deletion cost us a quarter of our review history instead of all of it.

You'll still see 306 reviews quoted on this site, because those couples wrote those words and we're not going to pretend they didn't. But only 228 of them are checkable by you today, and every one of those is linked to its source on our testimonials page. If a number can't be clicked through to somewhere we don't own, treat it as a claim rather than evidence — ours included.

04How to check a photographer

Most advice on choosing a wedding photographer in Northern Ireland tells you to read the reviews. Fine — but read them knowing that any single platform can remove a supplier's entire history on a Tuesday morning, and that the absence of a page tells you almost nothing on its own. Here's what actually holds up:

1. Reviews on at least two platforms the supplier doesn't control. Google plus an independent review platform is the practical minimum. A wall of glowing quotes typed onto someone's own website — no links, no sources — is not the same thing, and it's the easiest thing in the world to invent.
2. A real, findable company. We trade as Shine Pics; the legal entity is Wedding Photography Ltd, company number 17264007, and it's on the bottom of every page of this site. Any supplier's number can be checked on Companies House in about thirty seconds, and it's a decent proxy for whether there'll be someone to hold to account in eighteen months.
3. Ask where your photographs will live. Not "when do we get them" — where. On the photographer's own storage, backed up, delivered to you as full-resolution files you keep? Or in an album on a social platform that could disappear the same way ours did? A supplier who uses a social account as their delivery mechanism is one enforcement decision away from losing your wedding.
4. A written contract and public liability insurance. Both, before any money moves. Most decent venues in NI will ask your suppliers for the insurance certificate anyway.
5. Their own domain and their own email address. A business that has spent years on rented land, with no website of its own, has no way to prove anything about itself the day the landlord changes the locks.

05Building on ground you own

The lesson we've taken is a boring one, and it's the same lesson whether you're running a wedding photography business or planning the wedding: keep the things that matter somewhere you control.

For us, that means this website is now the record rather than the shop window. Reviews are republished here with a link back to the platform they live on, so they can be verified rather than believed. Prices are published in full on the packages page instead of being quoted in a message thread that a platform can delete. Enquiries come in by email, phone and the form on this site. The wedding photography and videography pages say exactly what's included, with no login required to read them.

And if we photographed your wedding — any year, any venue — a few sentences on Google or Reviews.io would genuinely help right now. It's the part of this that only past couples can fix, and it's the version of a review that outlives any one company's automated decision.

Meanwhile, the actual job hasn't changed in eighteen years: turn up, be good company, and hand back the day in pictures. If you're planning yours, tell us the date and the venue and we'll tell you straight whether we're the right fit.

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