What you get back
Original quality event photo downloads, file for file
Original quality event photo downloads mean the bytes your guests sent, not a preview of them: no re-compression, no watermark, no size reduction on the way in or the way out. Here is exactly what comes down, in what order, and what it is named.
Most galleries that let you save a photograph are quietly giving you a smaller one. The page you look at is a resized copy, the save button hands over a version of that, and the file that reaches your desktop has been through more compression than the phone that took it ever intended. A collection works the other way, because it was built for the opposite problem: the point of collecting a thousand photographs from a room is not to look at them on a website, it is to own them. What a guest sends is stored as it arrived, and what comes back out is the same set of bytes. Nothing is re-encoded on the way in, nothing is re-encoded on the way out, there is no watermark and no resolution ceiling, and the file that lands in your folder is the file that was on their phone, which is why it can go straight to a print lab, a photographer, or a video editor without anybody asking for the real one again.
What happens to a file on the way in, and again on the way out
- In: the phone chooses the bytes
- A guest picks files on the upload page and they travel to storage as they are, up to 15 megabytes for a photograph and 100 for a clip. The page makes a small preview so the gallery can load quickly, and that preview is stored beside the file rather than instead of it. The original is never overwritten.
- Out: the archive is packed, not painted
- The whole-collection download reads each stored file and writes it into a zip without touching its contents. Because photographs and clips are already compressed, the archive stores rather than deflates, which is why a large collection still finishes in a reasonable time and why an MP4 does not come out as a slightly worse MP4.
- Metadata travels with the file
- Nothing is re-encoded on the way out, so whatever the camera wrote into the file is still there when you open it: the date and time, the device, the exposure information. Some phones tidy a photograph when it is chosen for sharing, and a collection cannot put back what the sending device removed, but it does not remove anything of its own.
The three ways out, and who is allowed to use each
The whole collection, as one archive
From the organiser's own dashboard, the download is the entire set of files the collection kept: every photograph and every clip, streamed into a single zip. It is signed in, owner-only work, and the archive is named after the collection, so the file you save is recognisable two years later.
One file, with the name it came in with
In the media list, each row carries a download link for that file alone, under the name the sender's camera gave it. This is the route for the one frame somebody asks for, or the one clip that needs sending back to a family member before the weekend is out.
A selection, from the gallery page itself
When the organiser leaves downloads switched on, the people looking at the gallery can tick the frames they want and save that selection as a zip, or save one file at a time from the viewer. A guest archive is named after the collection, its entries numbered in the order the page lists them, and it holds only what that gallery was already showing them.
The setting that decides whether anyone else can save anything
Guest-side saving is a switch on the collection settings, on by default. Turn it off and the gallery becomes somewhere to look rather than somewhere to take files from, which is the choice a couple makes when they would rather the photographs came to them once and went out from them, and the choice a company makes when the room included people who were not employed by it.
Where the setting livesHow the archive is ordered, and what each file is called
The whole-collection download runs in arrival order: the first photograph a guest sent is the first entry in the archive, and each one is numbered, so the pile opens as a rough timeline of the day rather than as an alphabetical mess. The name beside that number is the one the sender's device gave the file, tidied rather than replaced, since a filename cannot carry every character a camera might use, and a very long name is cut short while it is at it. Two details follow from doing it this way. Order is arrival rather than capture time, so a relative who uploads on the Tuesday after the event lands at the end of the sequence even though their photographs are from the afternoon itself. And a file that storage cannot read is not silently dropped: the archive carries a small note in its place, with the name of what was missing, so nobody has to count frames to work out whether the download was complete.
What is in the archive, and what is deliberately not
- Every photograph and every clip the collection kept, at the size and quality they arrived at.
- Anything the organiser uploaded themselves, from the same dashboard, alongside the guests' files.
- Nothing written: the guestbook entries stay in the book on the collection page, and a person who wants them in print copies them out before the page closes.
- No list of who sent what. Contributor names are shown in the gallery and can be shown on the room display, and they are not written into the folder, so the archive and the credits are two things rather than one.
- No albums or groupings, because a collection is one event and the archive is one folder. Sorting by person, by day or by room is the job the filing happens to be, not a feature that can be exported.
- No rejected submissions. A file taken out of the collection is out of the gallery, off the screen and missing from the archive, which is the point of taking it out.
HEIC, MOV and the computer that receives them
Because the file is not converted, the formats your guests used are the formats you get. iPhone photographs usually arrive as HEIC, Android as JPEG, occasionally WebP, HEIF, AVIF or a GIF; clips come as MP4, M4V, MOV or WebM. On the Mac that is invisible, and the room display plays both families without help, but a Windows machine with an older photo viewer can open a folder of originals and refuse to show half of them, which surprises people. The ordinary answer is a free HEIF extension or the Photos app rather than any conversion service, since the moment an HEIC is pushed through an online converter it has lost exactly the quality this page is about. One naming quirk belongs to the guest-side route rather than the organiser's: files saved out of the gallery are named after the collection and given a jpg or mp4 ending whatever the camera sent, so an HEIC saved from a gallery tile may need renaming before a demanding application recognises it. The organiser's own downloads keep the original name.
Size, time, and what a large collection asks of a connection
- Per photograph
- Up to 15 megabytes. That is still a full-resolution frame from a recent phone, since a 48-megapixel HEIC arrives at six to nine, which is why the files that come in are the ones worth keeping rather than a chat-compressed version.
- Per clip
- Up to 100 megabytes. Enough for a speech or a dance and not enough for a whole match recorded from the back of a stand, which belongs on a drive.
- Per collection
- The allowance is a count of files rather than a bucket of bytes: 200 photographs and 30 clips, or 750 and 100, or 2,000 and 300, with more available as a one-off. A wedding at the middle number is a few gigabytes of archive.
- How it is delivered
- Streamed, file by file, so a multi-gigabyte collection costs no more memory than a single photograph. What it does cost is time and a steady connection, and the sensible habit is to start it on a wired machine rather than on a phone in a room with one bar of signal.
When to take it, and the window you are working inside
A week after the day
Take the first copy while the pile is fresh
Everything that arrived has arrived. This copy is the one that gets looked at, sorted and shared while the people who sent photographs still remember which ones they took.
Before anything is taken out
Take a second copy after tidying
Once late uploads have landed and the frames that do not belong have been removed, a fresh download is the clean set: what the collection kept, in the order it kept it.
The month before the page closes
The last chance, and the one people miss
A hosted collection stays open for six, twelve or twenty-four months from the event depending on the choice made at the start, with a one-off extension of six or twelve months available, and warning beforehand when it ends. After that the only copy is the one somebody took.
Once it is on your own storage
Two places, not one
A drive and a machine, or a drive and a cloud folder you control. The archive stops being a product feature the moment it is downloaded, and becomes an ordinary file that needs an ordinary backup.
What people do with the originals once they have them
A print, at a size that holds up
A canvas-printed photo off a screen is a soft mess at A3; a full-resolution frame from a recent phone is not. Prints, a canvas, a page for the yearbook and a frame for the grandparents all ask for the file rather than a gallery image, and this is the copy that has it.
Handing the day to somebody who edits for a living
A photographer or a video editor will ask for the originals, and will tell you within a minute whether you sent them a screenshot. The archive is the folder that answers that request, including the clips, which are the part that is always lost.
Making the film yourself
Clips come down as files rather than as a stream, so a season montage, a birthday film or a funeral slideshow can be cut in whatever software the house owns. Nothing here exports a video for you, and nothing here has re-compressed the ones you are cutting.
Giving a family their own copy
The reason a download exists at all: a folder of the day sent to the person who could not come, on a drive, in a message, or printed. It also means the copies relatives save from the gallery are the same quality as the one you keep.
Filing it as the record of an occasion
A club, a church, a school or a street committee takes the archive and puts it wherever its records live. The hosted page is the temporary half of the arrangement, and the folder is the half that ends up in the yearbook forty years later.
The questions an archive raises the first time
Is the file the same one my guest sent?
Yes. It is stored as it arrived and written into the archive as it is stored, with no re-encoding, no watermark and no resolution ceiling on the way out. If the photograph came in at forty megapixels, it goes back out at forty megapixels.
Why are some of the files named with a number in front?
That is the arrival order, so the folder reads as a sequence of the day rather than as an alphabetical jumble. The name after the number is the one the camera gave the file, with characters the archive cannot carry tidied out.
Can guests save the photographs too, or only the organiser?
Both, and the organiser decides. There is a switch on the collection settings, on by default, that lets people saving from the gallery take individual files or a selection as a zip. Switched off, the gallery is somewhere to look rather than somewhere to take files from.
Does the download include the messages people wrote?
No. The archive is photographs and clips. Written entries stay in the book on the collection page and are copied out separately, and the names contributors gave are shown in the gallery rather than embedded in the folder.
What about the photographs I took out of the collection?
Not in the archive. A file removed from the collection leaves the gallery, the room display and the download, because all three read from the same set. That is the mechanism by which taking an unwanted frame actually protects it from being printed by somebody else.
Will the download still work after the collection closes?
No, and that is the reason to take it early. A hosted collection stays open for a fixed period from the event, six, twelve or twenty-four months depending on the choice made at the start, and can be extended once by six or twelve. After it closes, whatever is on your own storage is the entire record.
Is a zip the only shape it comes in?
For the whole collection, yes: one archive, streamed file by file, which is why a big set takes a while rather than failing. Individual files can be saved without the archive, and a guest can take a selection as its own smaller zip.
Take the archive while the photographs are still arriving
A collection is judged by what is left in somebody's hands after the page closes. Download the originals, put them in two places, and send the folder to whoever asked for the photograph of their own child.
How it works
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.