How to collect photos and videos from your guests

Why guests' photos are worth collecting

A photographer sees the ceremony, the speeches and the first dance. Your guests see everything else: the car on the way, the corner of the bar where the real conversations happened, the children under the table, the faces of the people the photographer did not know to look for. Between them, eighty guests take more pictures in one evening than any single person could, and most of those pictures stay on their phones until the phone is replaced. Collecting them is not about quantity. It is about the twenty you did not know existed.

The difficulty has never been willingness. Guests want to share. The difficulty is that every way of sharing used to ask something of them: an app to install, an account to create, a group to join, a file size to accept. Remove those steps and the pictures come.

Choose how guests hand them in

There are four common ways, and each has a cost you should know before you choose:

• A group chat: everyone already has it, but photos are compressed, videos are cut short, and a month later they are buried under a thousand messages. Fine for a dinner, poor for a wedding.
• A shared cloud folder: originals are kept, but guests need an account with the same provider, the link is easy to forward to the wrong person, and nobody reviews what lands in it.
• Disposable cameras: charming, and you get twenty-seven frames per table of unknown quality, weeks later, at the cost of developing.
• An event page with a QR code: guests scan a code, pick the photos on their phone and send them in original quality, with no app and no account; the host reviews them and shares the gallery back. This is what EventAssets does, and the rest of this guide assumes something like it.

Whichever you choose, choose one. Two ways of sharing means two places to look and half the photos in each.

Make it effortless on the day

Guests upload when the step is in front of them and takes less than a minute, so put the code where they already are and tell them what it is for in one sentence. Print the QR code on a card at every table, on the welcome sign and near the bar; the QR code guide has the sizes that scan reliably. Next to the code, write what to do, not what it is: "Scan to share your photos with us" works, "QR code" does not.

Have someone say it out loud once. A line from the host or the master of ceremonies after the meal, "the code on your table is for your photos, please send us everything", doubles the number of uploads. Then give guests something to photograph: a short list of prompts on the back of the card, such as "the best dressed table", "a photo with someone you just met", "the dance floor at midnight", turns passive guests into a second photo team.

Set the window

Open uploads before the event so early photos, the getting ready, the journey, have somewhere to go, and keep them open for weeks afterwards, because many guests sort their photos on the train home or the following weekend. One reminder a few days later, with the link, brings in the second half of the pictures. A hard end date is still useful: it gives you a moment to close the gallery, download everything and move on.

Albums and order

A gallery of six hundred unsorted files is where photos go to be forgotten. Create a few albums before the day, named by moment rather than by person: the ceremony, the dinner, the party, the day after. Guests choose the album as they upload, or you move photos later; either way, the person who looks for the speeches finds them. Keep the albums few. Four is easy to choose from, twelve is a chore.

Review before you share

Not every photo belongs in the gallery everyone sees. Blurred frames, duplicates, a screenshot sent by mistake, the one picture a guest would rather not have published: a quick review catches them. Set the gallery so new uploads wait for your approval, go through the queue once a day for the first week, and approve in bulk; it takes minutes. If your guests are people you trust completely and the event is small, automatic approval saves even that.

Download and keep

The originals should end up in two places that are yours: your computer and a backup. Download the whole gallery as one archive once the uploads have stopped, keep the folder names of the albums, and copy it to a second drive or a second cloud account. Then share the gallery with the people who could not come, which is often the moment the photos mean the most.

Privacy and courtesy

Guests' photos show other guests, so a few rules keep everyone comfortable. Share the gallery through a page that only people with the link can open, not a public feed. Ask before posting a photo of someone else on social media, and honour a "please take that down" without discussion. Be careful with children: some parents do not want their children's faces online at all, and the easiest way to respect that is to keep the gallery private and to say so on the invitation. At a company event, say on the registration page that photos will be taken and shared internally, and give people a way to opt out.

If you use EventAssets, the gallery is private by default, uploads wait for your approval if you want them to, and a photo is deleted in one tap when someone asks. The support article shows how to review and organise what comes in.

A checklist

• Choose one way of collecting photos, and make it one that keeps originals and needs no app.
• Create three or four albums by moment before the day.
• Print the code on every table and on the welcome sign, with one sentence that says what to do.
• Have the host mention it once, and give guests a few prompts.
• Open uploads before the event, keep them open for weeks, and send one reminder.
• Review new uploads daily for the first week and approve in bulk.
• Download the whole gallery as an archive and keep a backup.
• Keep the gallery private, ask before posting others, and say so on the invitation.