Necessary or Not: Engagement Photos?

I think it depends on how many high quality photos you have of you and your partner and how comfortable you are with being photographed. I had a coworker do "family photos" of us pre-engagement (I really wanted a nice photo of myself, my partner, and our dog because we have so few photos with all three of us) and we used some of those on our wedding website and for our STDs. You really only need one good photo (or a handful at most), so if you already have some I don't think an engagement shoot is necessary.

Here is the photo we used for our Save the Date. I'm a photographer as well so I just edited the shots my friend took. We probably would have gotten better images with a professional people photographer, but this was more than adequate for our needs. You don't need a whole album worth of engagement photos, IMO. However, if we had not had this shoot done I probably would have wanted to do an engagement shoot just so we could have photos with our pup! I also think engagement shoots can be a great way for you and your wedding photographer to get to know one another and to become more comfortable in front of the camera (and being guided, posed, directed by your photographer) prior to the wedding.