What a Google Photos shared album does well
A shared album in Google Photos costs nothing to set up and holds a large collection: the table above gives how many photos and videos fit in one album. You share it by link or by a QR code made in the app, and anyone with the link can view the album, even without a Google Account. Guests can comment and react, and as the owner you can switch adding, comments and likes off.
When contributors back up in Original quality, their photos and videos keep the resolution they were taken in. Google states no end date for an album: what people added stays for as long as the album exists and they remain in it. An album can also play as a slideshow on eligible TVs and smart displays. If your guests already keep their pictures in Google Photos, the album sits where they look anyway.
Where EventAssets offers more
EventAssets is built around the event rather than the album. Each event 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. The guest list feeds the seating chart, guests look up their table on the page, and budgets keep the costs beside it. The guestbook takes written messages and voice recordings made in the browser.
For the photos, guests open the link or scan the QR code and upload from the browser on their phone, with no app and no account. Every file is kept in its original quality, whatever the guest’s phone is set to, and what guests send uses no storage of theirs or yours. Uploads can wait for your approval before anyone else sees them, albums keep the ceremony, the dinner and the party apart, and you download everything as one ZIP file. A full-screen slideshow picks up new uploads while it runs, so it works on a screen at the venue.
An album in a library, or a home for the event
The core difference is what each one is for. A Google Photos album is part of a photo library: what guests add sits in Google Photos, and the photos stay with Google for as long as the album does. EventAssets is a home for the event: it begins with the page you send with the invitation, holds the replies and the seating, and keeps the photos, videos and messages together afterwards.
That difference shows when you want to keep everything. Google’s help says that the photos and comments a person added leave the album when that person leaves it, and that saving the whole album means adding it to your own library, which uses your storage, and exporting it from there. On EventAssets, the gallery stays online for a set window, listed in the table above, and you download everything as a ZIP before it ends. If you want the album to stay without a set end date, Google Photos does that; if you want one download of the whole event, EventAssets does.
What to check before you decide
Think about your guests and what they already use. If they all keep their pictures in Google Photos and you only need a place for the photos, a shared album may cover it. If you want guests to upload from their phone’s browser without installing anything, to approve what appears, or to keep the replies, the seating chart and the guestbook in the same place as the photos, compare the planning rows of the table as well. Estimate how much your guests will send and check whose storage it uses. Then try the free plan: with EventAssets, the event page, the guest list and the guestbook are yours to set up before you pay anything.
