Do I need to include family pictures when applying for a UK Visitor Visa?

Question

Do I need to add any family/wedding photographs after adding marriage certificate and kids birth certificate.

Do I need a cover letter and what details should I show on the cover letter.

Answer 1

It appears that you may have it cross-wired.

People use photos, like wedding photos and family photos, when they are applying for a spouse visa or fiance visa. They think that photos will help prove that the marriage is genuine and not a sham marriage. These are 'settlement visas' meaning that the spouse is coming to live in the UK permanently so they don't need to show round-trip tickets and the decision-makers do not care about ties to their native country and all the other things a visitor has to show. The place to ask more questions about those visas is Expats.

You are, on the other hand, contemplating a visit visa which is an altogether different topology. Photos for visit visas rarely make it out of the mailroom. For the most part, they are irrelevant because you need to prove different things.

Do I need to add any family/wedding photographs after adding marriage certificate and kids birth certificate.

Why? If you want to prove you are married you can include a certified copy of your marriage certificate (or the original if you are confident they will return it). Along the same lines, children's birth certificates are redundant to their passports. If they want a full-on DNA test to prove out the distaff or spear side lineage, they will call you in.

As a general rule, if you send in lots of irrelevant stuff they will conclude (and rightly so) that you have not studied the guidance and the supporting documents list. This weakens your application because how can you be trusted to follow the rules if you don't know what they are?

So study the guidance.

Do I need a cover letter and what details should I show on the cover letter.

A cover letter does not appear anywhere in the rules; it is not required. On the other hand a well-crafted, word-smithed cover letter can carry the application and sometimes the results border on miraculous. It means a mediocre application becomes a strong one. Sadly, a sloppy, poorly-crafted letter hurts the application so you need to think it over carefully. UK solicitors with a specialty in visit visas are the best at cover letters if you decide you want to go that route.

As to what points a cover letter should address, we have an open question about that here. So it's technically a duplicate. The sole answer (at the moment) takes up a different case than yours. If another answer doesn't appear in the next few days, you can simply use the "ask question" button and ask a highly focused question about what to write. You would need to give a few details about your circumstances (i.e., your current question does not contain enough details/information to get a meaningful answer and users have been attempting to extract the details in comments -- it's a less focused thing and people lose interest going back and forth in comments to get the relevant information so try to make your question complete with respect to details and your personal circumstances).