How do guests upload photos?

What a guest actually does, step by step

The whole thing is 4 movements, and a guest who has never seen the album before gets through it in under a minute. Nothing is installed on the phone, and nothing is left behind on it afterwards.

1. Point the camera at the codeEvery phone sold in the last 8 years reads a QR code from the normal camera app, with no separate scanner app. A link appears across the top of the screen within a second or 2.
2. Tap the linkThe album opens in Safari, Chrome or whichever browser the phone already uses. The album name is the first thing on the screen, so the guest can see they are in the right place before they send anything.
3. Choose the photosThe upload button opens the phone camera roll. Several photos can be selected at once, so a guest with 30 frames from the dance floor does not send them 1 by 1.
4. Tap upload and waitA progress bar runs while the files go across, then the screen confirms the photos have arrived. The guest can add more straight away or close the tab.

Guests can leave a name with their upload if they want to, and skip it if they would rather not. Either way the photos land in the same album, and the host sees them in the dashboard within seconds of the upload finishing.

The 4 steps can be repeated as often as a guest likes across the evening. After the first visit the album sits in the browser history, so the second and third rounds do not need the printed code at all.

Do guests need an app or an account?

No. There is no app to install, no store to visit and no account to create. The album is a web page, and the upload happens in the browser that came with the phone.

That is the single decision the rest of the product is built around. An install is a 3-minute detour with a password at the end of it, and a guest holding a drink at 11pm will not take it. A page that is already open costs nothing, so it gets used.

Guests are not asked for an email address or a phone number either. If a guest types a name, it is shown beside their photos so you know who sent what, and leaving it blank is a normal way to use the album. Nothing is sent to a guest afterwards, so nobody signs up to anything by helping you.

Hosts do have an account, because a host has an album to manage, a code to download and photos to keep. That account is created once, before the event, by the person paying for it. Guests never see it and never need it.

The effect shows up in how full the album is rather than in a feature list. Every extra screen between the code and the camera roll loses a share of the room, and a sign-up screen loses the largest share of all. Removing that screen is the only reason a guest album fills up on the night instead of 3 weeks later.

Guests who are less confident with a phone

Most parties have a table where the phones are older, the eyesight is worse and nobody wants to be the person who breaks something. That table is worth 5 minutes of planning, because it usually holds the guests with the photographs nobody else took.

Print the code larger than feels necessary. 5cm square is the smallest that scans reliably from a seated position, and 8cm is calmer on a table with candles and glasses on it. Put the album web address underneath in plain text, so a guest who cannot make the camera behave can type it instead.

Write the instruction as an instruction. Open your camera and point it at this square works for everybody in the room. Scan to share does not, because it assumes the reader already knows what scanning means.

Ask 2 people to be the ones who help. A best man, a niece, a colleague who is good with phones, anybody who will walk a table through it once and then move on. 1 person doing that at the right moment fills more of the album than any wording on the card.

Older phones are rarely the real obstacle. Any iPhone from 2017 onwards and any Android of a similar age reads a code straight from the camera app, and the album itself is a plain page that loads on almost anything with a browser. The obstacle is usually confidence, and confidence is fixed by a larger code and a person who offers.

Which files the album accepts

Guests send whatever their phone produces, so the accepted list is written around phone output rather than around professional formats. The table below covers what turns up in practice at a wedding or a birthday.

In practice the table matters less than it looks. Every current iPhone and Android produces a format on the accepted list without the guest choosing anything, so the rows are there to answer a question rather than to warn anybody. The only regular disappointment is a professional trying to drop RAW files into the guest album, which is not what a guest album is for.

Files are checked as they arrive rather than after the event. A guest who picks something the album cannot take sees a message on the spot, so nothing is quietly lost between the party and the morning.

The upload keeps the original file rather than a messaging-app copy. That is the whole point of the album: a photo sent through a group chat arrives at a fraction of its size, and the same photo sent here arrives whole and prints properly.

How many photos 1 guest can send

There is no per-guest limit. A guest can send 3 photos or 300, in 1 batch or across the whole evening, and the album will take all of them.

The practical ceiling is the phone and the network, not the album. Selecting more than about 50 photos at once makes the picker slow on older handsets, so 20 to 30 at a time is a calmer way to move a large camera roll.

Uploads run while the page stays open. A guest who locks the phone halfway through may find the transfer paused when they come back, and reopening the album finishes it without losing what already went across.

Limits that do exist sit at album level and come from the plan the host bought, not from the guest. The dashboard shows how much of the album is used at any moment, and it counts photos and videos together in the same figure.

Duplicates deserve a word. If a guest uploads the same photo twice the album keeps both copies, because 2 near-identical frames are sometimes genuinely different moments. Removing the spare is 1 tap in the dashboard, and it is easier than guessing on the guest's behalf.

Do not judge the album by how it looks at 8pm. Guests upload in bursts, usually after the meal and again at the very end of the night, so a quiet album early in the evening is the normal shape of the day rather than a sign that anything is broken.

When the venue wifi is weak

Most wedding receptions happen in buildings that were never designed for 100 phones at once. The album is built for that, and the short version is that a weak connection makes uploads slow rather than making them fail.

Photos go across 1 file at a time and pick up where they stopped. If the signal drops mid-file, the page retries that file when the connection returns instead of starting the whole batch again.

Tell guests they can leave and come back. The album lives at an ordinary web address, so somebody who gives up in the cellar can finish from the car park, from the train home or from the sofa the next morning. Nothing expires when they close the tab.

If you already know the venue is difficult, do 2 things in advance. Ask whether there is a guest network and print its name and password on the same card as the code. Then say on that card that uploading later is completely fine, which removes the pressure that makes people abandon a slow transfer.

Mobile data is usually the better route for video. A 2-minute clip over a congested venue network can take several minutes, while the same clip over 4G or 5G is often quicker than the walk back to the table. Guests near a data limit can send photos at the party and leave the videos until they are home.

When a guest has no smartphone

Some of the best frames at a party come off a compact camera owned by somebody who has had it for 15 years. There are 3 routes into the album for that guest, and none of them involves buying a phone.

The first route is a computer. The album opens at the same web address in a desktop browser, and files can be dragged into the page from a folder or straight from a card reader. That is the route for the aunt with a camera, a laptop and a quiet Sunday.

The second route is you. Anything handed over on a memory card, an SD card or a USB stick can be added from the host dashboard after the event, and it sits in the album alongside everything the guests sent. Photos added this way carry whatever name you give them, so the credit is not lost.

The third route is the person sitting next to them. A guest with a phone can photograph the same moment, or take the card home and upload it that week. It sounds crude, and it is the route that actually happens most often.

Print the album web address next to the code for exactly this reason. A code is no use to somebody who will upload from a laptop 3 days later, and a short line of readable text costs nothing on the card.

Questions hosts ask before the day

These 4 come up in almost every email about uploading. The answers are the same ones a guest would get if they wrote in themselves.