Screens and displays
An event photo display on TV that plays what your guests sent
An event photo display on TV is a web address opened in a browser on a machine that reaches the panel. The practical part is the machine, the input it sits on, and the four settings somebody has to change before the room looks at it.
The question an event photo display on TV raises is not a design question. It is a mechanical one, with a short answer. The photographs your guests sent are played by an address, that address opens in an ordinary browser, and the only decision in front of you is which machine holds the browser and how the machine reaches the panel on the wall. Once the shape of it is in your head, the whole thing becomes a cable problem rather than a software problem, which is good news: cable problems can be settled the afternoon before an event.
The address that opens the slideshow
A collection has two public addresses, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is printed on your table stands: a browser page with a file picker and one name field, nothing for anybody to install. The second is the slideshow address, which does the opposite job. It opens full-screen on a machine, plays the collection to whoever is standing in front of it, and reaches no other part of your account. It carries its own permission, so holding the link is not the same as holding your login. That separation is what makes a room display safe to hand over. A coordinator, a parent, a relative with a lead in their bag: any of them can be trusted with the screen address, and none of them can accept a submission, delete one, or see a list from it.
Two further properties matter before you build anything around it. The address plays the collection rather than a presentation somebody saved on Tuesday, so the wall keeps changing while the room keeps sending, and the same link opened on a Sunday carries better material than the one opened at eight on Saturday. And it is only ever as full as the pile underneath it, because nobody sends a photograph to an address they were never told about. If a wall looks thin, the fault is upstream of the panel.
Three ways to get a browser onto a panel
A laptop and a lead
The ordinary answer, and the one that survives contact with a venue. Any machine with a browser and an output that reaches the television will carry the wall. You control its settings, you can move it when the room needs the socket, and if it fails you have a second browser in your pocket.
A streaming box behind the television
Many panels have a browser of their own, or a stick in the spare socket behind them, and either opens the address. Tidiest in a living room, where there is no laptop to hide. A mixed blessing in a venue, because the remote for that box is usually the television's own and is usually picked up by a guest trying to turn the volume down.
The room's screen and the room's machine
Halls and function rooms already have a panel and a plan for it. Ask one question early: what is plugged into that screen, and who else wants it this evening. Display settings then belong to the building rather than to you.
What the machine beside the screen needs
Open the slideshow address rather than the gallery
The gallery is built for a hand: a scrolling grid, a name under each frame, an upload button at the top. The wall plays the same photographs arranged for a room.
Go full-screen while the room is still empty
The first impression of your collection is whatever the tab looks like when guests walk in, so do it from the machine that will run the evening and check the address bar has gone.
Switch the display timer off
The commonest way a wall goes black in front of two hundred people is a sleep setting nobody touched. Stop the laptop sleeping when its lid closes, and check whether the panel dims after ten idle minutes.
Silence everything else on that machine
Mail, calendar reminders, the messenger with the group chat. One banner sliding down beside a photograph of a grandmother turns a wall into a desktop.
Set the input once, then leave the panel alone
Which socket the screen is reading is decided by the television's own remote, which belongs to the room rather than to you. Set it, then put that remote somewhere it will not be found, because a guest who believes they are lowering the volume can switch the picture to a cooking channel in one press.
Walk to the back of the room and look
Five minutes of viewing distance tells you more than an hour of planning. Faces need to read from the furthest table. Check with the lights as they will be, and with afternoon daylight if the event runs into it.
Notice what is missing from that list. Nothing needs installing on the room's computer, no folder needs exporting the week before, and nobody has to sit beside the machine all evening. A web address opens and the photographs play. Everything after that is a decision about what the wall may show, which belongs to the collection rather than to the television.
A projector is not a television
Rooms reach for a projector because a projector is large, and regret it for two reasons. A projected image has no contrast to spare, so dark frames flatten and the vertical low-light photographs a room produces become grey shapes from the back tables. And a projector makes every decision public in a way a home panel does not: a frame one guest would have scrolled past on a phone becomes an announcement to everybody at once. If the room is dim, run the collection on the television and let the projector keep whatever the venue booked it for.
- Light in the room
- A television holds its contrast with the curtains open; a projector does not. Match the display to the hour, and do not ask a room to choose between two bright rectangles.
- Shape of the picture
- Panels are wide, and almost every photograph a guest sends is tall, because almost every photograph a guest takes is held in one hand pointed at another person. A tall frame on a wide screen leaves space either side, which is a reason to prefer one layout over another.
- Reading distance
- A hall needs more clear faces than a living room. If nobody can tell who is in a photograph from the furthest table, you are showing a texture rather than a collection, and a layout that sets several frames at once usually reads better there.
- Who else wants it
- Projectors belong to buildings. Which other event has the same machine booked, whether a venue laptop is permanently connected, and who owns the only remote: those three facts decide how long your wall runs.
Four things a display like this will not do
- It does not cast from a phone. The wall plays from a browser on a machine connected to the panel, and a guest's photographs arrive by being uploaded to the collection rather than beamed across a table.
- It does not pair with a television over Bluetooth. Whatever wireless a room has belongs to the room, and nothing here needs it.
- It carries no soundtrack of its own. The display is the visual half of a collection, and the room's music stays on the room's own equipment. A filmed entry can be given its own audio, if you want a speech heard rather than watched, and that is a switch on the slideshow settings rather than a setting on the television.
- It cannot control a venue's television: not the input, the volume, the brightness or the power. Somebody holding the room's remote does those things, and that person should be named before the event rather than discovered during it.
The wall can be steered, but only from the machine
People picture a screen that plays on its own and cannot be touched. In practice one keyboard within reach can send it full-screen, step it forward or back off a frame nobody wanted, hold one still while a table argues about who is in it, and mute a clip. Skipping is a switch on the slideshow settings, and it is on by default; turn it off and the wall becomes a broadcast nobody can interrupt. What no key can do is put a photograph on the screen that the collection has not accepted, because that control sits on the collection rather than on the panel.
How the settings workWhat the layouts do on a wide panel
- A small number of good frames
- Cinematic Film or Editorial Magazine, one photograph given the whole screen. Right in a quiet room where people actually look, wrong in a hall where the wall is decoration, because a single frame at a distance is easy to miss entirely.
- A large number of similar frames
- Dynamic Mosaic. Many small pictures at once read as a room rather than as a loop of the same toast, and repetition stops being a fault in a layout built to carry it.
- A warm afternoon in daylight
- Storybook Album suits outdoor frames on a bright panel, and looks out of place once the room switches to artificial light, where Minimalist Motion becomes the more natural of the two.
- A mantelpiece feeling
- Polaroid Memories reads as printed photographs rather than as a broadcast, and it is the layout guests point their own phones at, which is a useful way to tell whether the wall is working.
One layout is chosen per slideshow, before the event, and it stays chosen. Make that decision in the same week you decide whether arriving photographs are looked at first: both belong to the collection, and both are easier to change in March than in front of a room in September.
Handing the screen over
Handover is where a display like this fails, and it fails for one reason: the person operating the screen was never told anything, merely gestured at. So give one named person two sentences rather than a briefing. This address plays photographs from the tables on the screen at the back, and nothing needs touching. Attach the address as text, because a screenshot of a web address cannot be typed into a browser when the laptop has to be restarted.
- The slideshow address as text, plus the same address emailed to yourself so it survives a dead phone.
- One line naming the machine connected to the screen and the input the panel is set to.
- Confirmation that display sleep is off and the laptop is on power rather than battery.
- One instruction about the remote: the input is already set, and nobody changes it.
- A note of who holds the guest upload address, because the two links look similar in a message thread and only one is meant for a screen.
- The sentence for the welcome speech, written down, because whoever reads it will be nervous.
Keep both addresses off anything public. A collection page is kept out of search indexes and listed nowhere, and the wall link is the same kind of private address.
The living-room version of the same wall
Half the useful life of an event photo display on TV happens after the event, in a room with four people in it. A Sunday afternoon, the collection opened and left running while tea goes cold, three generations arguing about who took the blurry one. Nothing about the arrangement changes for that: same address, same machine, same photographs. What changes is what you want from it. At the venue the wall was something the room fed while it carried on around itself; at home it is the record. Hosts who planned the display for the event alone often let the collection close without ever opening it again.
The screen at the venue entertains a room. The screen at home is how a family finds out what happened when nobody was photographing on purpose.
So take the download as well as the wall. A collection stays online for the period the plan states, counted from the event date, with warning mail before it comes down, and after that the archive you took is the copy that survives. It holds the same material the screen played, with anything you did not accept left out.
What it costs, and the first questions
Do I need a special television or a particular make of panel?
No. The display is a web page, so any screen with a machine behind it that can open one will carry it. Ask about the room rather than the panel: viewing distance, how bright it gets in the afternoon, and who owns the remote.
Can guests send photographs straight to the television from their phones?
Not directly. A guest scans a code or opens a link, uploads from their browser, and the wall plays what has arrived. The phone puts files into the collection; the machine beside the screen puts the collection on the panel.
Is the slideshow included with every collection?
It comes with Celebrate at $39 and Keepsake at $69. On Gather at $19 it is a one-off add-on of $9 for that single event, and the free plan buys the same one-off rather than carrying the screen. Guests never pay and never see a price whichever you chose.
What stops an unwanted photograph reaching the screen?
Looking at submissions yourself before they play. That is a switch on the collection, off by default, and the wall inherits whatever it says: only accepted photographs are shown. Leave it off and everything arriving goes straight up.
Should I give the venue my login instead of a link?
There is no need to, and you should not. The screen plays from its own token-gated address, separate from your dashboard and from the guest upload page, so it reaches the display and nothing else.
How large a collection can one wall play?
The screen plays the collection, so the ceiling is the plan behind it: 200 photographs on Gather, 750 on Celebrate, 2,000 on Keepsake, with extra uploads available for a collection that is still filling.
Settle the cable before you settle the photographs
Which machine, which input, whose remote, what happens to the display timer. Decide those four this week, open the address once on the real panel, and the wall looks after itself while the room fills it.
Slideshows and room displays
Put one link on the tables and let everyone contribute.
Create a collection, print the table stands, and the photographs your guests took are waiting for you the morning after. Guests never install anything and never make an account.