Why collect your guests' photos at all?

Think about the last event you went to where you took photographs. A wedding, a birthday, a leaving party. You took maybe twenty or thirty. How many did you send to the person the event was for?

For most people the honest answer is somewhere between zero and three, and the three were chosen because they were flattering to you. The rest are still on your phone, and they will stay there until the phone dies.

The failure is friction, not affection

Nobody withholds photos out of malice. They just never get around to it, because sending them is genuinely awkward. You have to select them, decide whether to compress them, wait for them to upload over a hotel network, and do it at a moment when you remember and have signal at the same time. Every step of that loses people.

So the default outcome of any event is that the photographic record fragments across dozens of devices and stays there. Not because the photos are bad. Because nobody built a place to put them.

What you lose by not collecting

• The moments in the rooms your photographer was not standing in, which is most rooms, most of the time.
• The hours after paid coverage ends, which at a wedding is often the best part of the night.
• Every photograph of your photographer's blind spot: you, from behind, being looked at.
• Video, which almost nobody hires for and which ages better than stills.
• The photos of your guests that your guests took of each other, which are the only images of half your guest list.

What collecting actually costs

One QR code on a table and a few minutes of setup. That is close to the whole overhead. Guests scan it, a web page opens, they pick files and upload. There is no app to install and no account to create, which matters enormously, because every additional step removes a fraction of the room.

The reason to do it before the event rather than after is simple: afterwards you are asking people to do work, and you are competing with the rate at which a camera roll gets buried. During the event you are asking them to do something they were already doing anyway.

It is not a crowdsourced album

A common objection is that guest photos are worse than professional ones, and mostly they are. That is not the point. Nobody is proposing you swap your photographer's album for four hundred phone snaps. The two things answer different questions. We went into that separately.

A professional gives you the event as it was composed. Your guests give you the event as it was experienced. You want both, and only one of them will arrive without being asked for.

The second reason: giving it back

Collecting is half of it. The other half is that once the photos are in one place, everyone who was there can see them. Your guests are also missing most of your event, and they also want the parts they missed. It is the half of this that gets the least attention.

Keep reading

• Your photographer is not what this replacesThis is not a cheaper professional. It is a different thing entirely, and the distinction matters.
• The photos your guests never sawYou were not the only person who missed most of it. Everyone was in the wrong room for something.
• The only photo of that momentSome things that happened at your event exist in exactly one photograph, taken by someone who does not know they have it.

For your kind of event

• WeddingsTwo hundred cameras, one gallery, including the hours after coverage ends.
• BirthdaysNo photographer, twenty-five phones, and the most-photographed forty seconds of the year.
• Baby showersTwo hours, twenty phones, and a guest of honour who saw none of it.