Guests of every age, and one thing to do
A birthday is the hardest room to collect photographs from. The guests are eight years old and eighty, they carry four different kinds of phone, and not one of them is going to install something to help you.
So there is one thing to do. A code on the table opens the upload page in whatever browser the phone already has. No account, no download, no sign-up form standing between somebody and the picture they just took. If they add their name it travels with the upload, so the next morning you know who sent the good one of the cake.
Photos and video both. The four people who all filmed the candles can all send what they filmed.
The night as it arrives, or after you have seen it
Uploads do not decide for themselves whether the room can see them. You decide, when you create the event, and the choice covers everything that arrives afterwards.
If the party is family and close friends, let uploads appear for invited guests as soon as they finish: the gallery fills through the evening and people watch it happen. If the guest list is wider, hold everything for approval instead, and each upload waits until you release it. If you would rather nobody browsed at all, keep the gallery to yourself and let guests contribute without seeing it.
Whichever you pick, every upload has a state you can read — waiting, approved, or turned down — so you always know what is in the room and what is still with you.
Comments and reactions stay off until you want them
A shared gallery can be a conversation or it can be a quiet pile of photographs, and which one it becomes should be the host’s decision rather than a default somebody else picked.
So both start switched off. Comments are off. Reactions are off. Turn them on and the party can talk underneath the photographs; leave them alone and the gallery simply collects.
That matters most at a child’s birthday, where the people in the pictures agreed to nothing and the sensible setting is the quiet one.
Afterwards: keeping what you want to keep
The gallery is open for fifteen days. Downloading is a setting on the event: allow it and guests can save the photographs they are looking at, refuse it and the gallery stays something to look at rather than something to take away. Where downloads are allowed, they can carry a watermark.
Saving happens file by file today. A single archive of the whole event is on the downloads screen, but the service that builds one is not switched on yet, so the button is disabled and says so rather than starting a job that would never finish.
On day fifteen access ends for you and for your guests. Administrators can reach the content until day thirty for recovery, security and support, and on day thirty it is permanently deleted. Keep what matters before the clock runs out.
