Twelve breakout rooms. One photographer.

The usual arrangement is one photographer for a day with parallel tracks, plus a Slack channel where a handful of people post phone photos that get lost in a week. Neither produces an organised, usable, rights-cleared set of images afterwards.

Parallel tracks are a coverage problem

If your event has four things happening at once for six hours, a single photographer can be present for roughly a quarter of it, and less than that once you subtract travel between rooms and the time it takes to get a usable frame. Attendees are in every room by definition. Their photos are the only record of most of the sessions.

Turn on review before the event

This is the part that matters for a company and does not matter much for a wedding. New event galleries show photos as soon as they are uploaded, so for a company event, turn on review in the gallery settings before you share the code. From then on every new upload waits, invisible, until someone approves it. That gives you a review step before anything appears in a shared gallery: you can keep whiteboards with unreleased plans on them out, drop photos of people who would rather not be in them, and check that nothing confidential is legible in the background.

Guest viewing is a separate switch from uploading, and it starts on, so turn it off while the event runs. Collect for a week, review properly, and open the gallery to attendees only when you are ready.

One collection instead of a Slack channel

Chat is a terrible archive. It recompresses images, it has no structure, it loses files behind retention policies, and nobody can find last year's offsite in it. A collection with an access window you control gives you a set of full-resolution photos you can actually export and reuse.

You are not trying to replace the event photographer. You are trying to stop the other three hundred cameras going to waste.

• Review is one setting away

  Turn it on and nothing new is visible until approved. Any photo can be hidden at any time, review on or off.

• Upload and viewing are separate

  Collect first, review at your own pace, open the gallery to attendees only when you are ready.

• QR codes per room

  Put the same code on every table and door card. Attendees scan and upload from the browser, no install, no account.

• Export at full size

  Keep the whole set at full resolution for internal comms, decks and recruiting pages. Your own export includes hidden photos; attendees' never does.

• Covers parallel sessions

  Attendees are in every room. Their photos are the only coverage most breakouts will ever get.

• A defined access window

  Set how long the gallery stays open. When access ends, viewing and downloads pause and the archive is retained, not deleted.

Questions people ask

Can we review photos before anyone sees them?

Yes, once you turn on review in the gallery settings; it is off when a gallery is created. With review on, a guest upload stays invisible to everyone but you until you approve it. Guest viewing is a separate setting you control, so you can also close the gallery entirely while you review.

How do we handle people who do not want to be photographed?

Hiding is where that gets enforced: you can hide any photo, and with review on you can keep an upload from ever becoming visible. It is still worth telling attendees the collection exists and how to ask for a photo to be taken down. Be precise with them about what that does here: hiding a photo takes it away from every guest, and the photo stays in the private archive rather than being erased.

Is this suitable for confidential events?

Use your judgement. With review on, every upload is checked before it is visible, and the gallery is access-controlled, but the safest position for a genuinely sensitive event is still not to invite photography. Treat review as a control, not a guarantee about what people do with their own phones.

Can we keep the photos for next year's recruiting page?

Take your own copy while the collection is open and keep it wherever your company keeps assets. Access expiry pauses viewing and downloads; it does not delete your archive.

Does it work for a holiday party rather than a conference?

Yes, and turning on review matters more, not less. A party produces exactly the photographs that need a review step before they appear on a company gallery.

Keep reading

• 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.
• Your photographer is not what this replacesThis is not a cheaper professional. It is a different thing entirely, and the distinction matters.
• Phone photos got beautiful. They also got heavy.Every camera upgrade in your pocket is also a storage problem, and events are where it shows up.

Other celebrations

• 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.
• QuinceanerasThe portraits are planned. The eight hours afterwards are not.
• Baby showersTwo hours, twenty phones, and a guest of honour who saw none of it.
• GraduationsRow 34, a fixed stage, and classmates with the shot your family wanted.

For photographers

• Deliver the session. Let them choose.Private client galleries, selections, watermarked previews and a portfolio.