Name the collection, and the address your guests use comes with it
Four screens stand between an empty account and a link you can put on a table. This is what each one asks, what it refuses, and the single choice you cannot make up your mind about later.
Creating a collection is the shortest part of the whole thing. It takes about a minute, it asks five questions, and it charges nothing. What it does produce is an address — the words that go on the table stands and the link that goes in the invitation — and that is the one output you cannot quietly change once three hundred people have it.
So this page is not a sales pitch for a wizard with four screens. It is a walkthrough of what each field means in practice, which ones are optional, and how the collection behaves between the moment you save it and the moment the first guest arrives.
Four screens, in order
Event details
The occasion, a name for the collection, the date, and two optional lines — who the invitation is from, and where it is happening. This screen can be abandoned halfway: Save draft writes a real collection row so you can come back to it, and nothing on it can go live.
Background
A picture behind the guest page. Choose one from the wall or upload your own. A file from your machine is held until the collection exists, because its bytes need somewhere to go, so the upload happens on the next screen and the wizard tells you if it fails.
Review and confirm
Everything you typed, read back to you in a plain list, plus the guest address and the choice about how photographs arrive. This is the screen where the collection is actually created. Nothing before it writes more than a draft.
Get your QR code
The code, the link, and a button that takes you to the print sheet. The collection is still a draft at this point, already on the free Preview plan. It becomes a live page the moment you open it.
What the first screen asks for
- The occasion
- Wedding, birthday, graduation, baby shower, anniversary, corporate event, conference, family reunion, or something else. It changes the words the form shows you and the shape of the guest page; it does not change what you can collect.
- The name
- The line at the top of your guests' page. Two names and a date work better than a location, because in a year nobody remembers which hall it was. The form suggests a shape for each occasion — a wedding reads as a couple, a birthday reads as a person and an age.
- The date
- Today or later. A date that has already gone is refused on the screen and refused again by the server, because a collection that opens after its own event has no reason to be on somebody's account. The date is also what the closing clock and the reminder mail are built on.
- Names on the invitation
- Optional, one line, shown under the name on the guest page. For a wedding it is the couple; for anything hosted by a family it is usually the family's names. Leave it empty and the guest page simply runs without it.
- Venue
- Optional, and displayed as a short line under the date. It helps guests put the right evening to the right photographs, which matters most when a household runs more than one collection a year.
Nothing on that screen is load-bearing except the date. The name can be edited afterwards in the settings, the occasion affects presentation rather than limits, and the two optional lines can be added the morning after if you remember them.
The guest address is the field to think about
The wizard offers you one and lets you overwrite it: lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, up to sixty characters, sitting behind the same address your guests already know. It becomes the URL they land on and the text inside the QR code.
Make it short and make it boring. A guest who cannot scan — a cracked camera, an old phone, a printed stand under a downlight — has to type it, and typed addresses are won or lost on how few decisions they contain. "amelia-and-tobias" types in nine seconds without looking anything up. A string of initials and a year is worse than either, because it forces a guest to ask somebody what the last part was.
The wizard marks the address as fixed once you have printed stands for the collection, and that is the honest rule rather than a UI nuisance. A photograph of a QR code that is already on four hundred cards, or taped to a bar, or mailed to a relative abroad, is a code that cannot be reissued. Choose it before you print. Everything else on the page can change.
The address never changes again — including after the collection closes
A printed stand stays valid for the life of the files, and the page it opens tells guests the truth about the state of the collection instead of dead-ending. The trade-off is that the choice is permanent, so the review screen shows it to you one last time before anything is written.
How the stands are printedOne question about how photographs arrive
The review screen asks what happens when a guest uploads, and gives you two answers.
Add it to the gallery straight away
The default, and the right one for most rooms. A photograph a guest sends at half past eight is on the shared page before the toast, which is the whole reason a room screen is worth setting up. The cost is that nobody has looked at a file before another guest sees it.
Let me approve each one first
Nothing reaches the gallery until you say yes to it. Choose it when the room contains people you have not met, when the event is a surprise, when the collection is being run by an organisation rather than a household, or when the screen in the room is the thing you care most about. It costs you a few minutes with a phone in your hand during the evening, and unreviewed files are invisible to everyone until you get to them.
It is a switch, not a wall: you can turn it on in the first ten minutes when a stranger's blur of the buffet arrives, and turn it off again at midnight when you decide you would rather have the collection than control it.
A draft costs nothing and shows nothing
Between saving the collection and choosing a package, the address exists but the page does not open. A guest who arrives early reads that the collection is not open yet; they are not charged, not registered, and not left with a broken link they will assume was your fault. Nothing is billed while a collection sits in draft, and an unfinished draft is not held against you as a used place.
- Type the guest address out as if you were a stranger with an old phone — would you manage it from memory?
- Say the collection name aloud. It is the line that appears in every mail your guests get.
- Check the date against the real one, not the one you guessed when you started typing.
- Decide whether photographs need to be approved before anybody else sees them.
- Print a stand and scan it yourself before the invitations go out.
All five of these are still editable later. The address is the exception once something has been printed.
Questions the first screen raises
Can I change the collection name after the invitations go out?
Yes. The name is a line on the guest page, not part of the address, so editing it changes what guests read without breaking anything they already saved. The address is the field that cannot move once it has been printed.
What if I start a collection and never use it?
A draft that never opens charges nothing, and unfinished drafts are cleared well after the date you picked, so an abandoned one does not sit in your account taking up a place. A draft that has passed its event date is deleted rather than left to look like a promise.
Does the occasion I pick change what I can upload?
No. The occasion sets the words and the presentation. Photo and video counts, storage and how long the collection stays online come from the package, which is a separate choice made after the wizard closes.
Can two people run the same collection?
A collection has one owner account. Anyone with the guest address can contribute photographs, and the host can forward the dashboard address to a person who is helping, but there is no second manager login to hand out yet, so the approvals and the settings live with one account.
Do I need to pick a package before I print anything?
No. The QR code and the print sheet are available on the last screen of the wizard, and the code carries only the address. Printing stands while the collection is still a draft is normal — Preview is assigned as soon as you create it, so guests just read that it is not open until you open it.
Set the collection up while you still have the details in front of you
Five fields, a name for the guest page, and a QR code you can print the same minute. Every collection starts on the free Preview plan, so nothing is charged until you move up, and the address is yours to keep as long as the files are.
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.