photos.. what is too much?

[jo-macral]

I would like to print the pictures at home, however I only have a B&W laser, so I will probably have to go to a photo shop and print them as regular photos.

Do you think they would mind if the pictures are B&W?

 

[Sweden]

I would like to print the pictures at home, however I only have a B&W laser, so I will probably have to go to a photo shop and print them as regular photos.

Do you think they would mind if the pictures are B&W?

As long as they are clear and your face are recognizable, I am not sure it matters... but home printers are not always the best quality ( at least that's my experience). So for us, we prepared everything at home (word document with 2 pictures per page, caption of who was when, where etc, and the question it referred to if needed, and a headline with the name of applicant and Form IMM etc), and then asked at my work place if I could print one copy of each page... my boss said yes, she understood that it was important, and I was using the company's printer for that, but she supported it and it was fine. I think it's worth getting a good copy of it so that it's easy for the officer to see who is in the picture and not have to look twice before recognising people and place. I didn't go to a professional and printed on photo paper, just normal paper but in color and in relatively good quality.
Good luck,
Sweden

 

[Rob_TO]

As long as they are clear and your face are recognizable, I am not sure it matters... but home printers are not always the best quality ( at least that's my experience). So for us, we prepared everything at home (word document with 2 pictures per page, caption of who was when, where etc, and the question it referred to if needed, and a headline with the name of applicant and Form IMM etc), and then asked at my work place if I could print one copy of each page... my boss said yes, she understood that it was important, and I was using the company's printer for that, but she supported it and it was fine. I think it's worth getting a good copy of it so that it's easy for the officer to see who is in the picture and not have to look twice before recognising people and place. I didn't go to a professional and printed on photo paper, just normal paper but in color and in relatively good quality.
Good luck,
Sweden

That's exactly what i did as well... set up all the pics in a document at home, then print from the laser printer in my office.

If you don't have this option, a cheaper alternative to printing out a ton of individual pics at a photo shop, is to set up the pictures in a document file and then print out colour pages at a Kinkos or Staples or somewhere. Considering the $1000+ you are already spending on the CIC fees, an extra $10-$20 is well worth the investment here.

As Sweden said, the last thing you want is the VO squinting at your photos trying to see if it's really you and your partner in them. There is some emotional response the VO will experience when looking at your proof... and if something just doesn't "feel right" to them (such as suspecting if a blurry or b&w photo is really you) it could add tons of troubles to your process. Best to send in the best and clearest application you can right from the start.

 

[canadianwoman]

If your relationship will seem suspicious to the visa officer for some reason (applicant from country notorious for marriage fraud, wife much older, very short relationship, etc.) then send more photos. If your relationship would seem 'normal' and you have lots of other evidence, then I would say no more than 100 photos should be sent, if that.
The visa officer tends to just flip through the photos, so try to make sure you get a variety of shots - definitely don't be wearing the same clothes in most of the photos!

 

[blueboom]

It must depend on the case. A thousand photos seems excessive - unless you have been together for an extremely long time. These were the questions we asked ourselves when we were putting together our application: what is each photo contributing to our application? What is our visa officer going to conclude from going through 1000 photos that he or she won't conclude from a well-selected group of 200 photos? Our visa officer doesn't need to see the same idea from three different angles. I had to tell my partner that the visa officer wasn't going to appreciate how good his hair looked in that one photo because what good is it if s/he can't see my face!

We had 6000 photos from our wedding but we only submitted about 50 from the wedding itself because we didn't think the VO needed to see every single ritual that we went through, but we did show a variety of the rituals from our wedding, photos that showed the amount of guests in attendance, and most importantly, photos where we looked happy. Believe me, we were not running at 100% happiness on our wedding day because our families were driving us insane, but we remember the exact moments of happiness and luckily we had photographers to capture those moments. We also included various outings we took together at different times (including boring stuff like when we went to Superdrug!), our honeymoon, our trips together, when I met his family for the first time, when we registered our marriage at the registrar, and so on. Hopefully our decision will be effective, plus we have a lot of extra photos we can show on demand at the interview.

As to how I prepared the photos - I turned our photos into a Powerpoint presentation (captions underneath) and depending on the orientation of the photos, printed two or four slides to a page on matte paper from my home printer.

 

[aerogurl87]

I think we sent about 20 pictures total with our application. 16 of which were on photo paper with names, dates, and descriptions on the back. The other ones were from Facebook print outs of where our friends and family were commenting on our photos. We decided in the end that showing concrete evidence (ex. print outs of email conversations we had with our friends and family about one another, joint bank account statements, airline stubs, etc.) were more important than a ton of photos.