Online galleries
An online event photo gallery for every occasion
A page of photographs that lives at a web address, holds everyone's contributions, and closes on the day you chose — which is more than most online galleries can promise.
Search for an online photo gallery and you get two kinds of result: a storage service that wants you to move your whole library into it, or a printing company that wants you to build a book. Neither is what an event needs. An event needs a page that fills up while the party is happening, that a hundred people can add to from their phone, and that you can hand to the room on a screen — then bring down when the photographs are safely yours.
What an event gallery has to do that a photo library cannot
Accept contributions from strangers to the platform
Your guests are not users of anything. A gallery that needs an account is a gallery that gets eight contributions, because the other ninety-two people will not create a password at a wedding.
Open on a phone, from a printed code
Almost nobody types a URL into a browser at an event. The gallery address has to be reachable by pointing a camera at a card on the table, which means the page it opens has to be built for a thumb, not a desktop.
Take video without turning it into a thumbnail
The clip of your best friend's toast is worth more than the photograph of it. Messaging apps squeeze video until it is unwatchable; a gallery should hold the file at its real size.
Belong to the host
The photographs are the point, not the platform. A gallery you can download in one action is a gallery you will still have in ten years.
Have an end
Open-ended galleries accumulate and are then abandoned. A stated closing date is what makes people download while they still care, and it is why nothing sits on a server forever by accident.
The gallery the guests see, and the one you see
These are the same photographs, arranged for two different jobs. Getting that distinction right is what makes a gallery comfortable to use.
- The guest page
- The occasion, the hosts' names, the date, and four things to do: upload photographs and clips, see the gallery if you are allowed to, leave a message, and get out of the way. It is deliberately short. A guest should be able to finish in under a minute.
- Your dashboard
- The same collection with the machinery attached: what arrived and from whom, which submissions are waiting for approval, how much of your allowance you have used, the QR stands to print, the slideshow link, the reminder mail to send, and the download.
- The room slideshow
- A third address that plays the gallery on a big screen — a separate surface, because a projector in a dark room needs different typography and pacing than a phone in a hand.
A gallery is only worth building if the people in the photographs can reach it without asking you for help.
Occasions, and what each one needs differently
The mechanics do not change between a wedding and a graduation. What changes is who is contributing, how much of the event they will photograph, and how careful you need to be about what shows.
Weddings
The largest number of cameras and the highest stakes. Put a stand on every table, turn approval on if the room includes anyone you have not met, and give the couple the slideshow link so the room is watching their own photographs.
Birthdays
Mixed ages, so the QR code matters more than the link — a grandparent will scan, a teenager will not click a URL in a group chat. Video clips are where the value is: the singing, the candles, the reactions.
Graduations
Contributions arrive over several days rather than one evening, because the ceremony, the lunch and the evening out are three separate groups of people. The link travels well in a message the next morning.
Baby showers and engagements
Smaller rooms, higher sentiment. The written guestbook earns its place here: the messages are as kept as the photographs.
Corporate days and conferences
Approval is not optional, and the gallery is usually switched to upload-only. The archive goes to whoever runs communications, and the closing date is set with that handover in mind.
How long the gallery stays online
This is the question most hosts ask second, after whether guests need an app. The answer is a number, not a promise: each plan states how long a collection stays up from its event date, and the mail warning you before it comes down is sent automatically.
- Preview · free
- 7 days, 20 photographs, 10 contributing guests, no video, no downloads. A real event, a short leash.
- Gather · $19
- Six months, 200 photographs and 30 videos, unlimited contributors, written guestbook, downloads.
- Celebrate · $39
- Twelve months, 750 photographs and 100 videos, video guestbook, live slideshow, a look at each submission before it shows, original-quality downloads.
- Keepsake · $69
- Twenty-four months, 2,000 photographs and 300 videos, premium themes and extra people helping to manage it.
- Extensions
- Six or twelve more months can be added to a collection that is still open, starting when the included period ends rather than on the day you buy it.
Download before the closing date, not after
Once a collection comes down, the photographs that were in it go with it. The archive you downloaded is the copy that survives, so treat the warning emails as the last useful nudge you will get.
How retention and deletion workMaking it look like your event rather than a product
A gallery is a page with a name on it, and the name is yours. Beyond that, the plans differ in how much control you get over the surface: the free tier shows the plain gallery, Gather and Celebrate let you change the appearance, and Keepsake carries the premium themes. The decisions every tier puts in your hands are whether guests can browse what has arrived, whether the guestbook is open, and what the welcome line says when a guest arrives. There is also the control that decides how careful the room has to be: whether each submission waits for you before anybody else sees it.
- Write your own welcome line. The default is pleasant and generic; a sentence from you gets read.
- Check the event date. It decides the closing date, and a wrong date quietly shortens your gallery.
- Decide whether guests can browse, before you tell anyone the address.
- Open the guest page on your own phone once. It is the only way to notice a name spelled wrong.
- Print one stand and put it where a guest will actually look.
How the gallery behaves when the room is large
A gallery with forty photographs in it is easy. A gallery with nine hundred, half of them video, being opened by sixty guests on venue wifi at the same time, is where the engineering shows. Three things make the difference, and all three are invisible to the person looking at the page.
Previews are drawn on the guest's phone, not on a server
When a guest sends a photograph, the small square the gallery needs is made in their browser at that moment. The original is stored untouched. So the grid loads as thumbnails — fast on a bad connection — while the full file is still exactly what their camera produced, waiting in the download.
The archive is streamed rather than assembled
Downloading a large collection does not wait for a zip to be built somewhere. Files are pulled one at a time and pushed to you as they arrive, which is why a multi-gigabyte collection takes no longer to start than a small one and does not need a machine set aside for the job.
Video is played, not converted
Clips are stored as sent and played from the collection. There is no transcoding queue that has to finish before a clip becomes watchable, which matters most on the night: the video somebody took twenty minutes ago is on the screen twenty minutes later, not tomorrow.
Why a group chat and a shared cloud album fall short
Almost every host has tried one of these two before. Both collect photographs, and both fail in specific, predictable ways that are worth naming, because the failure is what sends people looking for an online event photo gallery in the first place.
What goes wrong in the chat
- Files are squeezed to save data, so the photograph you keep is not the photograph somebody took.
- There is no order. Eighty pictures scroll past in an evening and are unreachable by the weekend.
- Late joiners cannot scroll back, and guests added after the day never see the first hundred messages.
- Anything the room can see, the room can forward. There is no version of a group chat that stays private.
- Videos arrive as blobs, and the toast that made the room laugh arrives unwatchable.
What goes wrong with a shared album
- Every contributor needs an account, a device in the same ecosystem, and the confidence to accept an invitation.
- The invite has to be sent to a known address, so the uncle who shares a family mailbox is quietly left out.
- Your own photo library is the thing being shared, and nobody wants to think about which album pulls in what.
- There is no event, no name, and no date — it is storage, not a memory built for a particular day.
- Nothing ends. The album sits half-full for years, unvisited and undownloaded.
A gallery for your event keeps the part of each that works — anybody can add to it, and the files are kept as files — and drops the parts that do not. Contributors need nothing but the address. The collection has a name, a date, and an end. And when the day comes that you want the photographs for themselves rather than for the page, one download moves everything you own out of it at once.
Two things that quietly break a gallery
- The event date is wrong. Every plan counts the time a collection stays online from that date, so a gallery created for a Saturday that got dated the previous Tuesday closes two days early and nobody tells you until it is gone.
- The link went to one person only. A gallery that lives in a single group chat gets contributions from that chat. Print it, say it, and put it in the message that goes to everyone.
- Nobody watched the approvals. With moderation on, a submission that sits unreviewed is invisible to the room, so an album that looks ignored usually has thirty photographs waiting on a screen nobody opened.
- The download was left until the closing week. It works, but the archive is the only copy that survives, and the last thing you want is to discover a missing clip after the collection has come down.
All four are avoidable with one pass through the collection the morning after, and one download the week after.
Questions about online galleries
Is the gallery public?
No. It exists at an address that is not listed anywhere and is kept out of search indexes. Anyone who has the address can open it, which is why hosts decide where the link goes rather than who has permission.
Can I hide the gallery and still accept uploads?
Yes. Switching the public gallery off turns the guest page into an upload page; contributors send photographs and cannot browse what other people sent.
Does the gallery work on a projector?
That is what the live slideshow link is for. It plays the approved collection full-screen on the venue's television or projector, with pacing and typography built for a room rather than a phone.
What is the size limit on a photograph?
Modern phone images are well within what a collection accepts. The binding limit is the number of files your plan allows and the storage it comes with, not the resolution of a single picture.
Can several people manage the same gallery?
On Keepsake, yes — the tier includes extra people helping to manage a collection. Below that, one account owns it and the download is the shared copy.
Will the gallery appear in Google?
No. Guest pages are kept out of search indexes and the address is not listed anywhere, which is the point: a photograph of your daughter's birthday should be reachable by the people invited to it, not by whoever types her name into a search box.
Can guests see the gallery on a TV as well as a phone?
That is what the slideshow address is for. It plays the same collection full-screen with larger type and slower pacing, and it is a separate link, so you can hand it to a venue without handing over the dashboard.
What if I want the photographs but not the page?
Download the archive and let the collection close. Plenty of hosts use the gallery to collect and then keep only the files, in their own photo library, where they will actually look at them.
Open a gallery for the next thing you are hosting
Name it, print the stands, send the link. The free plan runs a real event for seven days so you can see what a gallery looks like when it fills.
Event photo sharing
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.