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Contributing photos to an event gallery

Someone running an event has given you a link or a QR code for a shared gallery. This page covers what you see when you open it, and how to add the photos you took to the same gallery everyone else is adding to.

Looking takes nothing but the code

Scan the code, or tap the link, and the gallery opens in an ordinary browser. Seeing what is in there needs the code and nothing else - no account, and no separate sign-in step.

That is worth knowing before you decide whether to scan at all, because a printed code on a table card tells you very little about what sits behind it. Opening it commits you to nothing.

Adding takes a PhotoLog account

Uploading is the part that works differently, and it is worth knowing before you are standing at the table with your phone already out. Photographs are added from a signed-in PhotoLog account, so adding yours is three steps rather than one:

  1. Have a PhotoLog account, and be signed in to it.
  2. Open the organizer’s link or code while you are signed in. That is what attaches their gallery to your account, at whatever level the code grants.
  3. Add your photographs.

The order is the part people get caught by. It is the code opened while signed in that gives your account access to the gallery, so scanning it first and signing in afterwards means opening the link a second time.

If you scanned and there is nowhere to add anything

A code opened while you are signed out gives you the view-only page. It carries no upload control and no prompt to sign in, so nothing on screen tells you what is missing. If you were expecting to add photographs and cannot find anywhere to, that is the likeliest reason: sign in to PhotoLog, then open the same link again.

There is a second possible reason, and it is not something you can fix from your side. An organizer chooses, when they create a share, whether it grants view or view plus upload, and that choice is fixed for that code. If the code you were given is a view-only one, the person running the gallery is the one who can issue a code that grants upload. QR sharing - how it works sets out both levels in full.

What happens to what you add

Your upload becomes part of the gallery as soon as it finishes. Nothing holds it in a waiting state first, and there is no approval step sitting between you and the gallery. Photos and videos are encrypted in the browser before they are uploaded, so PhotoLog’s servers only ever hold ciphertext - which holds for what you add to someone else’s gallery exactly as it does for your own library. How encryption works sets out the mechanism, what PhotoLog can still see, and where the honest limits are.

So the choosing happens before you add rather than after, and the controls that do exist sit somewhere other than where you are looking for them:

  • Removing your own upload yourself is planned and not yet built. What exists today is that someone with full access to the gallery, normally the person running it, can delete a photograph. If you add something by mistake, that is who to ask.
  • You are adding to someone else’s gallery, not to your own library. The person running it has access to what is in it, and they are the one who decides who else is given a code and when the code stops working.

What to add, and what to keep back

The useful habit is the one you would already use in a group chat someone else set up. Add the photographs that are of the event. Keep back the ones that are of a single person having a bad moment, and keep back anything you would not have shown that person on the night.

If someone at the event said they would rather not be photographed, a shared gallery is not the place that stops applying. A photograph you add is out of your hands in a way that one sitting on your phone is not.