What celebrate does well
celebrate is the photo app of kartenmacherei, the stationery maker from Gilching in Bavaria, and kartenmacherei's own wedding magazine suggests it to couples. It is a shared album for an occasion: the host creates it in the app without registering, shares the event code or the QR code from the album menu, and everyone who joins adds their pictures. The app comes in German, English, French, Italian and Spanish, on iPhone and Android.
Photos cost nothing, and there is no cap on how many an album takes. celebrate does not compress them: they keep their original quality and their file format, ready for a print or a photo book. They stay stored until you delete them or your account, so the album remains a place the family can return to. Inside the app, family and friends like and comment on each picture.
When you want everything at once, you select all the photos of the album, ask for the download on a computer and receive the download links by email. A web uploader adds photos from a computer as well. Because an album is not tied to one date, celebrate also serves beyond a single event: one album for the wedding, another for a birthday, another to keep the grandparents up to date with the grandchildren. And the pictures can become prints and photo products through celebrate's print app, which is how celebrate says it mainly earns its money; ordering them is optional.
If you only need photos shared and kept, free of charge and for as long as you like, celebrate covers that.
Where EventAssets works differently
The first difference is what guests do before they can share. With celebrate, they download the app and join the album; its FAQ says guests need the app to upload. With EventAssets, they open a link or scan a QR code and upload in the browser, without an app and without an account, which helps with the guests who would not install anything for an evening.
The second is videos and how you pay. With celebrate, videos come with the Premium album, a subscription for one album, paid monthly or yearly, and celebrate deletes the videos when it ends. With EventAssets, guests send videos on every plan. Its free plan has caps on photos, videos, storage and voice recordings, and one payment per event lifts them, with no subscription to keep running.
The third is the rest of the event. Each event on EventAssets has its own page with the schedule, the location on a map and what guests should know, and the same page collects the replies: guests find their name, answer for their whole party and fill in your questions before a deadline you set. The guest list feeds the seating chart, where guests later look up their table, and budgets with planned and actual amounts sit beside it. In the gallery, uploads can wait for your approval before anyone else sees them, albums keep the ceremony, the dinner and the party apart, and a full-screen slideshow picks up new uploads on a screen at the venue. The guestbook takes written messages and voice recordings made in the browser, signed with a name from the guest list or left anonymous. Hosts run all of it from the web or from the apps for iPhone and Android.
An album for the family, or a page for the event
The core difference is what each one is built around. celebrate is built around the album: a shared space in an app, open to everyone with the code, that collects photos and keeps them for as long as you keep it, for an event or for the family's everyday life. EventAssets is built around one event: it begins with the page you send with the invitation, holds the replies, the seating and the budget, then collects the photos, videos and messages and keeps them for a set period after the day.
Both work for a wedding. If most of your guests already have the app or will gladly install it, and you mainly want photos, celebrate keeps them free of charge and without an end date. If your guest list spans generations and phones, if you expect videos, or if you want the planning and the gallery on one page, a link that opens in the browser asks less of your guests. The guide to collecting guest photos has more on getting guests to send them. The table above sets both side by side, criterion by criterion, with the source of every fact.
What to check before you decide
Think about your guests first: whether they will install an app and join an album on the day, or whether a link that opens in the browser suits them more. Decide whether you expect videos: with celebrate, they need a Premium album, and you would download them before the subscription ends. Decide how long the photos should stay online and whether you will keep a copy of your own. Decide whether you want to approve uploads before they appear, whether the photos should be sorted into albums, and whether you want a guestbook with written or voice messages next to the gallery. Then look at where your planning happens: in separate tools, or on an event page that holds the replies and the seating chart beside the photos. With EventAssets, the event page, the guest list and the guestbook are yours to set up for free before you decide to pay for anything.
