Download the collection before its own closing date
The photographs belong to you, and the site holds them for a stated period rather than forever. This is how the download works, what arrives, and the order of operations on the morning after.
A collection is a temporary home for other people's memories, and the honest version of that promise is a date. The files sit on the site for as long as your package says — a week, six months, a year, two years — and then they go. Everything before that date is available to you in one action.
Two downloads, and which one you want
- The whole collection
- One action, one archive, everything the gallery is currently showing. This is the thing to do first, the morning after, before you have judged a single photograph. It is also the only download that guarantees you have what every guest sent.
- A single file
- Any photograph or clip, on its own, from the gallery or the media list. Use it when a guest asks for the frame of the two of them, or when you are sending the good portrait to somebody who will not open a folder of six hundred.
The free package is for looking, so it has no download. The $19 package gives you the whole collection and individual files at the size the gallery serves them. The two above it give you the original bytes — what came out of the guest's camera, with the metadata that came with it.
What is inside the archive
In
- Every photograph and clip the gallery is showing, in one archive you open once
- The bytes as they arrived, on the packages that serve originals
- The date each file was taken, from the camera's own record rather than the upload
- The name of the guest who sent it, where they gave one
- The guestbook text, written out alongside the photographs rather than as a separate job
Not in
- Files you deleted or refused — the archive is what you kept, not everything that arrived
- Anything from a collection that has already passed its closing date
- A folder structure you did not make: photographs arrive as a flat collection, because the organising is the part a host does afterwards
- A copy of anything still on the site after deletion — the download is the record, and the site is the temporary one
Nothing is compressed on the way in. A twenty-five megapixel photograph leaves as the same file it arrived as, which is the difference between an archive and a gallery of small pictures.
The order of operations on the morning after
Download the whole thing first
Judge nothing yet. The value of an archive is in the frames you would have deleted on a bad morning — the blurry one that happens to be the only photograph of two relatives together.
Open it on a real screen
A laptop, a television, anywhere bigger than the phone that has been scrolling it all night. The collection looks different at the size you will actually print it.
Copy it once before you organise it
A second copy, untouched, somewhere you do not work from. Deleting a duplicate is the normal way a good photograph disappears from a wedding archive.
Then tidy
Blurs, floors and the four-hundredth shot of the same cake go. What stays is the collection you would have chosen if you had been a photographer instead of a host.
Close the loop
Tell the guests you have it. A collection with no announcement attached is a collection half of the room assumes nobody got around to.
Take the archive before the day uploads close
Files are removed the day after uploads close, and the reminder mail that names the date goes out about a week ahead of it. Downloading before the closing date is the safe habit; downloading on the last afternoon is a task with a hard deadline attached to it.
What happens when a collection endsIf the download is slow or stops
A collection of several hundred files is a large archive, and the two reasons it usually goes badly are both on the guest's side of the wire rather than the server's: a laptop that has gone to sleep mid-download, and a wireless connection that drops when the file is three quarters through.
- Leave the tab open and the machine awake. A large archive is assembled once and then handed over, and a screen that locks in the middle of it is the most common interruption.
- Take the individual files you need rather than the whole archive, then come back for the rest on a better connection.
- Download from a different device on the same network, which rules out the machine rather than the site.
- If the archive genuinely will not assemble, write to the support address with the collection name and the date, and say what you have already tried.
Guests and their own copies
A guest keeps everything on their own phone, of course, and the gallery is not the only place they can see it — but the collection is the only place where all of it is together, attached to names, without anybody's messaging app having quietly shrunk it on the way past. That is the file worth downloading for the relative who did not attend and asked you afterwards.
Guests cannot download the whole collection; the archive belongs to the host. What they can do is take the photographs they sent and, on a collection that allows it, any single file they can reach — which is why the download you take on the morning after is also the thing you send to the people who asked in February.
Download questions
Do downloads cost extra?
No. There is no charge for taking your own files off the site while the collection is open — the download is part of the package, and a ceiling on it would be a ceiling on the point of the product.
Are the files compressed?
Not on the packages that serve originals. What your guests sent is what arrives, including the camera's own date and details. On the $19 package the archive is at the size the gallery serves, which is fine for a screen and a print, and not what you want if you are handing files to a photographer.
Can I download after the collection has closed?
No, which is why the closing date is stated on the dashboard from the first day and repeated by mail before it arrives. Once the files are removed there is no copy on the site to fetch.
Do the files I refused come back in the archive?
No. The archive holds what the gallery has — meaning what you approved and did not delete. A rejected submission is gone from the collection and never reaches the download.
How long does a large archive take?
It depends on the number of files and your connection rather than anything else. A few hundred photographs is normally a matter of minutes on an ordinary broadband line; a collection carrying clips is heavier, and worth starting before you need the laptop for something else.
The collection is only yours once it is on your own machine
One archive, every file that arrived, before the date you were told about. Take it the morning after and stop thinking about it.
How it works
From the invitation to the morning after
Nothing here needs an app, an account or a card. Guests give a name once and send their files.
Something this page does not answer? Write to support@candidphotos.myjoyfullday.com.