Screens and displays
A graduation photo slideshow from the family, not from the school
A graduation photo slideshow built while the day happens is a screen in the hall or the house playing what the relatives sent: the rows behind the gown, the caps going up, the lunch nobody photographed.
Showing the collection on the room's screen while the event runs.
Graduation days are badly photographed and everybody knows it. The school hires somebody who shoots the stage, the procession and the receiving line, and that set arrives three weeks later as a link to a shop. What nobody records is the part the family was standing in: the relative who flew in, the grandmother who could not get past the second row, the handshake that happened while the person holding the camera was looking the other way. A graduation photo slideshow is how that second set gets collected and shown, and the reason it works on the day rather than afterwards is simple: the people who saw those moments are the same people holding the phones.
Everything in this page is about the wall, which is a screen address that plays a collection. If what you want first is the way in for the relatives, the printed code and the page they open are covered on the graduation sharing pages, and the two links are different ones doing different jobs.
What the wall opens with, when the occasion is a graduation
A collection is named with an occasion when it is created, and graduation is one of the named ones, which is what decides the wording on the screen. Nothing on a graduation wall will say anything about a wedding, because the opening line is chosen by occasion rather than by a template somebody picked. What you get before the first photograph is a short title sequence, then a card carrying the name above the line, the name of the event, a standing sentence under it, the date spelled out in full, and the venue if you filled it in. For graduation the standing sentence is about the work rather than the party. You can replace it with your own line, and you can set how long the card holds between three and twenty seconds, which is the difference between a title the room reads and a title the room sees flash past.
- The line under the name
- Write it yourself if the standing one is not the tone of the day. One sentence, kept short, because a projector is not a card index and the room has two or three seconds with the text on it.
- Whether the name appears at all
- The screen can carry the event name through the whole evening, not just on the opening card, and that is a switch. On a graduation it is usually worth leaving on, because the day is about one named person and the room wants to know whose photographs it is watching.
- Whether the contributor is credited
- Each frame can show the name the sender typed. On a family wall this is the part that makes an aunt send a second photograph, and it is also why the spelling on the screen will sometimes be the family joke rather than the passport.
- How long a photograph stays up
- Between two and thirty seconds, six by default. A hall at the back of a row wants longer than a living room, and the only reliable way to find your number is to stand at the furthest seat and count.
The three rooms a graduation photographs itself in
The ceremony hall
Where the screen is not yours and the noise is somebody else's problem. Ask early whether there is a panel, what is plugged into it, and whether it is allowed to be on while names are being read. If the answer is no, the wall does not die there: the hall is where the photographs are taken, and the house is where they get shown.
The lunch or the house afterwards
The natural home for the wall, and the hour it works best. The room is already talking to itself, the ceremony photographs have not been seen by half the table, and everything the relatives sent during the morning appears on the screen in front of them while they eat.
The evening, with the people who could not come
A graduation is attended in two ways: in the seats and on a screen from another city. The same wall address opened by somebody at home plays the same collection, which is the part of the day that most often gets forgotten when the family is spread out.
Who is actually holding the phone at a graduation
A graduation audience skews older and more distributed than a wedding one, and that changes what the pile looks like. The photographs come from a handful of enthusiastic relatives and a long tail of people who meant to send something and did not. Two habits fix most of it. Put the address in the family chat as text the morning of the day, because a group chat is the only place a grandparent will reliably look. And accept that a lot of what arrives will be forwarded: photographs taken by somebody who never opens the link, sent on their behalf by whoever did. The name on the screen is the sender's, which on a graduation is often precisely the point.
- Name the collection with the graduation occasion at creation, so the opening card is not carrying somebody else's wording.
- Ask the hall one question about its screen and who owns the remote, and take the answer as final rather than hoping for a workaround.
- Open the wall once on the machine you intend to use, at the viewing distance of the furthest seat, with the lights as they will be.
- Send the play address to yourself as text so it survives a lost phone, and send the upload address to the family chat.
- Decide now whether arriving photographs go straight to the screen or are looked at first, because it is harder to change in front of a room.
- Choose the layout before the day, since one is set for the whole wall and cannot be switched between the lunch and the evening.
If the hall says no to the screen, take the refusal early and run the wall at lunch instead. A graduation wall that waits for permission arrives too late to fill.
Which layout a gown-and-caps pile needs
There are twelve presentation styles for the room screen and one of them is set for the whole collection. Graduation material has a particular problem: the events are brief, everybody photographs the same four of them, and the interesting frames are the accidental ones. A single-image layout will play nine nearly identical shots of a cap in the air before it reaches the photograph of the grandfather nobody knew had arrived.
- Many frames in one composition
- Dynamic Mosaic sets several photographs on the screen together, which is the honest treatment of a pile with duplicates in it. Repetition stops reading as a fault, and the accidental frame arrives beside the posed one instead of waiting eight minutes behind it.
- Printed photographs on a surface
- Polaroid Memories lays the frames out as tilted prints, and it suits a family wall in a house better than a hall. It is the layout people photograph with their own phones, which is a useful way to tell whether the wall is working.
- A book that turns
- Storybook Album opens the collection as a hardcover across the screen. For a graduation that the whole family travelled for, that register lands, and it is the one worth choosing if the wall is going to run in a living room afterwards.
- One frame, given the whole screen
- Cinematic Film or Minimalist Motion, and both flatter a good ceremony shot rather than a phone picture from row nine. Choose either when the collection will be small and looked at properly, and avoid both in a hall where the wall is background.
The practical problems that are specific to a school hall
What the hall does to your photographs
- Downlighting on a stage and a dark audience, so phone frames arrive noisy and underexposed
- A large room where the screen is at the front and the sightlines cross thirty heads
- A sound system with a speech on it, so a moving picture competes with somebody reading names
- A cleaning rota, a staff laptop, and a booking at five o'clock that nobody told you about
What to do about each of them
- Judge the wall by the ceremony frames, not by the posed photographs you took at home last week
- Stand at the back row once and count the seconds a frame needs there; it is usually more than six
- Keep the screen quiet through the readings and turn it on when the room starts moving about
- Ask which other event has the room that evening, in the same conversation as the one about the panel
The most common graduation wall is not in the hall at all. It is a laptop on a sideboard at lunch, running the same address, in a room where the family can actually talk to it.
What to do with it on the evening of the day
The collection on the night of a graduation is thin in a way a wedding never is, because most of the relatives went home with their photographs still in their gallery. Two things change that, and both are free. The address keeps working after the event, so the wall you ran at lunch is a considerably better wall on the Sunday, and there is a switch that lets a running screen pick up new contributions without anybody reloading it. Then say the sentence that makes it happen: mention the link once when the family is still together, name the day you plan to close it, and put both in the group chat rather than relying on the room's memory.
The graduation wall is not for the ceremony. It is for the twelve people who sat behind the gown and saw something nobody was hired to photograph.
The part almost everybody skips
Take the download, and take it while the material is all there. A collection stays online for the period the plan states, counted from the event date, with warning mail before it comes down, and the archive is what survives that date. It holds the same photographs the screen played, with anything you did not accept left out, and it arrives as original files rather than re-compressed ones, which matters when the graduate's parents want the frames printed. The other half of the skip is the reuse: the same wall at the following summer's lunch, or opened for the grandparent who missed the day, is the most persuasive argument for doing this again that exists, and it costs nobody anything to play.
What it costs, and what the room pays
Does the wall cost anything for the relatives sending photographs?
No, and they never see a price. Nothing is shown to a contributor but the page they open, the name field, and their own photographs once they have gone in.
Is the room screen part of every collection?
It is included with Celebrate at $39 and Keepsake at $69. On Gather at $19 it is a one-off $9 add-on for that event, and the free collection buys that same one-off rather than carrying a screen. A graduation that is only being collected does not need one; a graduation with a lunch at the end usually does.
How many photographs can a graduation collection hold?
200 on Gather, 750 on Celebrate, 2,000 on Keepsake, with extra uploads available as a one-off if the family is enthusiastic. Each photograph can be as large as 15 megabytes, which is what lets a phone send the original rather than a shrunk version.
Can we play films of the speeches and the caps going up?
Yes. Clips live in the same collection as the photographs and play on the wall among them, with a length ceiling you set for the room and sound off unless you switch it on. A clip can be as large as 100 megabytes, roughly four minutes of phone footage; anything longer is refused and the trimmed copy is what uploads.
Do the relatives need an app, an account or a code?
None of those. The link or the code on a stand opens a page in the browser already on their phone, they give a name once and are not asked again for twelve hours. Grandparents manage it; that is the test worth designing for.
What if somebody sends a photograph of the wrong graduate?
The collection is yours, so you can take it back out, and a screen that is already running loses it without a reload. This is the argument for looking at submissions first at a multi-family event, where two graduates may be sharing a hall on the same afternoon.
Can we use the same wall at the following year's gathering?
You can open it again any time while the collection is online, and it will play whatever has arrived since. A new event gets a new collection, which is the right shape for a family that photographs an occasion annually and does not want two generations mixed into one pile.
Get the family sending before the names are read out
One collection named for the day, one code in the group chat, one screen at lunch. By the time the caps go up, the photographs from the rows nobody photographed are already arriving.
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.