Bankrupt Wedding Photo and Video Company Owes $2.3 Million

There are many talented, respected professional wedding photographers and videographers. A lot of people do great work for their clients and deliver people with treasured photos and videos from one of the most special days of their lives. However, as controversy after controversy has shown, the wedding photo/video industry is also one rife with malice and scandal.

From exposés about fake client leads on massive wedding planning platforms, to wedding photographers being sued by a state’s attorney general for failure to deliver images, to a vanishing act and web of lies at a major wedding photography franchise, there is no shortage of people trying to take advantage of each other in the wedding industry, which is reportedly worth nearly $70 billion in the United States alone.

Enter Yours Truly Media, owned by Paul and Amy Bolton of Texas. This company appeared on PetaPixel‘s radar a few months ago when photographers and videographers came forward, alleging that the company had failed to pay them.

In the time since, a lot has happened with Yours Truly Media, including the company going completely upside-down and filing for bankruptcy, as Boston 25 News reports, and leaving photographers, videographers, and clients in the lurch.

Yours Truly Media, which still has a website but not an Instagram page, works (or worked) by having brides-and-grooms-to-be hire them for photography and videography services, and then Yours Truly Media would contract photographers and videographers in that local area to shoot the event. Although Yours Truly Media’s website still exists, it is worth noting it lacks functionality. Scheduling and contact forms are broken, for example.

The company acted as a logistical middleman, leveraging its once-broad online presence and industry awards to raise money from customers, theoretically using some of that money to pay people to do the actual work, and then taking the rest.

This can be a perfectly fine business arrangement. If all worked correctly, Yours Truly Media gets money, couples get photos and videos, and photographers and videographers get paid for their work without having to deal with all the rest of the stuff that comes from running a big wedding media company.

Except in this case, that last part, paying the photographers and videographers, didn’t happen consistently or on time.

One anonymous photographer told PetaPixel that they started working for Yours Truly Media back in 2018-2019, and the company was already having issues paying contractors.

“They always write their problems off as ‘COVID related,’ but even prior to COVID, they were struggling,” the photographer said. “They have been crooks for years.”

The photographer noted, however, that their issues had been limited to payment. The actual wedding clients themselves were great. The photographer stopped working with the company in 2023 after repeated nonpayment issues and was still owed money when the company filed for bankruptcy last month.

“When looking into the wedding field and considering subcontracting for a large-scale wedding company, I can’t stress enough how important looking up reviews are,” the photographer says, offering advice for others who want to shoot weddings. “The obvious ones like Google, Yelp, WeddingWire, The Knot, but more important than all is Reddit. Go on that app and find first person experiences from other photographers in photo based groups. Reddit is where you will find truly scathing reviews of YTM.”

Reddit is replete with complaints, from photographers and also wedding clients.

“My experience with Yours Truly Media has been extremely poor, to be sure,” another photographer, Becky MacDonald of Pretty Nerdy Photography, told PetaPixel.

“I started as a second photographer for them in 2019 where I was a second shooter initially. A second shooter is the second photographer at a wedding mainly there to capture the groom prep, cocktail hour, and fill in any gaps in the lead’s coverage. [Yours Truly Media] reaches out to assign jobs and it’s mostly first come first served,” MacDonald continues.

“Then I was moved up to lead in early 2020 where I shot for them for two more years against my better judgement. They had issues paying people every year, so if you shot any weddings in the Fall or Winter you’re lucky to be paid by the following spring. All of us had contracts that stated we should be paid within a NET60 payout period so essentially 60 days from the invoice date. They broke their contracts with hundreds of photographers and videographers. Initially I was understanding when it happened in 2019, their excuse being that they expanded too quickly, then again in 2020 with the excuse of covid, but it kept happening EVERY year. In 2021 when they did it AGAIN I was officially done with them and sent an email with a payout timeline ultimatum. They still made me wait so I took initiative and fought back.”

MacDonald’s fighting back took the form of a website on which she put up screenshots of Yours Truly Media failing to pay people and her personal experiences with the company.

MacDonald also supplied PetaPixel with extensive email communications between herself and Yours Truly Media, including people in accounting and the company’s CEO, Paul Bolton.

After MacDonald set up that website because she had tried and failed to get paid for many months, far beyond the NET60 terms under which Yours Truly Media then operated, Bolton finally responded to her. He said that he and Yours Truly Media had been respectful the entire time, and that the company was not “intentionally trying to make things harder” for MacDonald or other contractors.

“You aren’t up front with your contractors when they sign the contracts. I have fallen prey to the lies and promises time and again that I will be paid in the contracted amount of time, and every year you do this. Why do you sign the contracts, when you know in advance, that you’re not going to be able to pay them? You put the onus of all Yours Truly Media’s bills on the contractors. We are the ones suffering, not you. And when we speak up about it you hit us with lie after lie or copy and pasted responses with manipulative language saying that WE are the ones with intent to harm,” MacDonald wrote to Bolton in November 2022.

“Our rents and bills and empty kitchen shelves do not care about your payment delays. I don’t need to share my sob story but I bet your accounting department has heard all of them. Why don’t you personally respond to all those emails from hundreds of us who have held up our end of the contract, only to be left having to scramble to make up the money we were counting on to continue living? It’s probably hard to remember what it is like living paycheck to paycheck since the town you live in has an an average home value of $3 million.”

To that, Bolton responded that he doesn’t live in an affluent area and that he hadn’t received any salary from Yours Truly Media until all payment issues were resolved. This claim cannot be confirmed or disputed without complete forensic accounting.

Bolton then blamed the company’s money problems on the federal government, COVID, and “the higher powers at be.”

“It’s as if the higher powers at be dont want me to win out of this matter. Do I have the team sign contracts knowing that we will be behind… no I dont. I cant get into the excuses of why I come to that reason, but you dont want to hear that… you want me to do what is right. Meg, did tell me how this has affected you personally and I feel terrible about that… but is all my motivation to not quit,” Bolton continued in this unedited quote. “I dont expect you to come up with ideas… but as much as no one wants to hear this… I will get this done… I will get you paid and everyone else as well.”

That was in November 2022, after the company had already failed to pay people on time for years. The situation did not improve, though the company continued to operate and receive money from clients.

Photographer and videographer Jon Sadrgilany had a contract with Yours Truly Media last year for videography, promising a NET45 payment. Sadrgilany invoiced Yours Truly Media in late September for one job and in mid-October for a second. He was never paid.

“There were no significant red flags in the onboarding process. There were a few peculiarities that make more sense in hindsight though. I would periodically receive calls from a YTM worker to see if I was available for jobs on short notice. One time they even asked me if I could take a job in Wisconsin a few days out (I live in New Jersey) and didn’t offer to cover travel or other expenses. Now I realize they probably needed coverage for all of these jobs because other contractors were bailing on them due to nonpayment or risk of nonpayment,” Sadrgilany tells PetaPixel.

While Sadrgilany admits he wishes he had done more research about Yours Truly Media before taking on jobs with the company, he says he has never had any issues with other similar companies before, and had no real concerns.

Once Yours Truly Media was late and he started digging around, Sadrgilany found that he was far from alone.

“It seems most contractors’ experiences are the same from the people I’ve spoken to. YTM either takes forever to pay or just doesn’t pay at all. In many cases, contractors have to file small claims suits or withhold photos or footage from subsequent weddings as leverage to be paid,” he says.

In some cases, contractors did eventually get paid, just illegally late.

However, most people Sadrgilany spoke to eventually gave up trying and chalked it up to a loss.

To the bitter end, the company maintained that it had been paying everyone.

When Sadrgilany said he wasn’t going to show up to one of his jobs with Yours Truly Media, citing the company’s failure to pay him on time for prior work, the company’s COO, Joe Ankenbauer, told Sadrgilany to “do yourself a favor and show up.”

“If you choose to not show up, you will be liable for any damages for doing so. We will take you to court for this, so you will be liable for that as well,” Ankenbauer wrote.

“While there is ‘evidence’ that some payments have been made late, there has been no one that hasn’t been paid. Especially the timeframe this photographer you talked to has said. How would we be in business if we just didn’t pay anyone. Like I said, there have been delays. But no one has never been paid.”

“I sensed the COO, Joe, had done this before, and this domineering behavior is corroborated in other contractors’ experiences,” Sadrgilany tells PetaPixel.

Per Boston 25 News, Yours Truly Media filed for bankruptcy in Texas on February 26, 2026, alleging that it owes $2.3 million to hundreds of different creditors. The list of creditors includes photographers, videographers, and nearly 500 wedding couples. It doesn’t sound like Yours Truly Media had been paying people all along.