deleting my cousin’s wedding pictures that I wasn’t paid for?
My younger cousin’s wedding was last December and she asked me to be the photographer for the wedding (I’m a semi-professional photographer).
She told me what types of photos she wanted and I gave her a quote of just under 1k. Wedding happens, I take the pictures, I edit them, then wait for payment which we agreed I’d get in full after the wedding before sending any pictures.
However suddenly she didn’t have money and wanted to set up a payment plan to pay it off in 8 months AND still get the pictures now.
It’s not that I don’t trust her but once you start opening such doors you’ll find it hard to close them so I told her we could do the payment plan but the photos will only be released when the full amount is paid (didn’t even add interest).
She didn’t respond. February rolls in and she asks to at least see ‘samples’ to confirm that they were worth the price.
I sent 4 pictures and she says she’ll show them to her husband and get back to me. Cue silence for a week or two until I asked for an update and she responded saying she’s still discussing it with him.
I told her this was getting long and she must just start paying now and she ignored me again.
So I’d saved the photos on my roommate’s flash drive temporarily while I was waiting on an actual hard drive. June came around and he texted me while I was at work saying he needed to use it and took it from my room but saw that there were still files on it.
He couldn’t move it to his laptop because it didn’t have space (thus him needing the flash) so he was ‘asking’ if he could delete the files.
I saw fine and he deleted them. I still had about 20 of the photos saved on my phone from when I was choosing/sending the samples so I just explained the situation in a message to her and sent the existing photos free of charge.
That was last month and I’m still getting flamed for this. She’s been slandering me online and it’s quite literally created a division between our families and to the point that our mums don’t talk now.
I obviously feel bad but also feel like given the circumstances, I wasn’t really in the wrong though still acknowledge that it’s obviously very shitty for her that I would’ve wished to avoid.