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Setting up and sharing an event gallery

If you are the one running the event, you create the gallery and decide how people reach it. This page covers setting one up, sharing it by link or QR code, and what the gallery looks like once contributions start arriving.

A share points at one gallery, so where you draw the gallery’s edge is the decision that shapes every other one on this page. For most events that edge is the event itself: one gallery for the whole day, which everyone adds to.

Splitting into two is worth it when the audiences genuinely differ - a ceremony that is for family and an evening that is for everyone are two groups of people, and putting them in one place is a decision rather than a default. Splitting for tidiness alone is not: it doubles the signage and gives every guest a choice they can get wrong.

You create a share for the gallery and choose what it grants. PhotoLog produces both a web link and a QR image for that same share, so a printed card on each table and a message in the group chat are two ways of handing out one thing rather than two things to keep in step with each other.

You can also make more than one share for the same gallery. Each is its own code with its own link, its own QR image and its own settings - which is what to reach for when two groups need different treatment, such as a code on the table cards for guests and a separate one for the photographer.

Choose view, or view plus upload - once, per share

You choose view, or view plus upload, when you create a share, and which of the two it grants is fixed from then on. For an event where you are hoping to collect people’s photographs, view plus upload is the one. There is no upload-only share: anything that can add can also see. QR sharing - how it works sets out both levels in full.

The setting belongs to the share, not to the person holding it. There is no per-person exception inside one share, so if two groups need different access, that is two shares.

Your contributors will need PhotoLog accounts

A share code is enough to see a gallery. It is not enough to add to one. Photographs are uploaded from a signed-in PhotoLog account: a contributor signs in, opens your code, and the code attaches your gallery to their account at the level you chose. From that point they can add.

Someone who scans your code without signing in reaches the gallery in view-only form. That page carries no upload control and no prompt to create an account, so the step they are missing is not put in front of them. It falls to your card, your sign or your message to say it.

Two things follow, and both are cheaper to do in advance than to explain on the night:

  • Say it where the code is. A line on the card - “a PhotoLog account is needed to add yours” - costs almost nothing and answers the question at the moment it comes up.
  • Treat signing up as part of the ask. It is a step, and some people will stop at it. If particular photographs matter to you, ask those people in advance and give them the chance to set an account up before the day.

Uploads land as they arrive

This is the question worth settling before the event rather than during it: what happens to a photograph once someone adds it?

It becomes part of the gallery as soon as the upload finishes. Nothing holds it in a waiting state first, and there is no queue for you to work through afterwards. PhotoLog does not offer moderation of event uploads today - reviewing a contribution before others see it, and the pending, approved and rejected states that would go with it, are planned and not yet built.

So your control sits earlier and later than people tend to expect, and not in the middle:

  • Earlier - who gets the code. A card handed out at the door reaches a different set of people than a code printed in a programme that leaves the building. That choice is the real filter, and it is made before anyone scans anything.
  • Later - when the code stops working. You can deactivate a share at any time. That ends access through the link; it does not remove photos or videos already added while it was live.

A share does not close itself. If the gallery is only meant to be open for the weekend, closing it on the Monday is a thing to put on your list, because the default is that it stays open.

Say what the code is for

The card is where someone decides whether to scan at all - they cannot look at the gallery first and then choose. So the card has to answer the question the code itself cannot.

Four things are worth the space: whose event it is, that it is there for adding their own photographs, that adding needs a PhotoLog account, and roughly how long it stays open. “Photos from Sam and Ada’s wedding - scan to see them, sign in to PhotoLog to add yours, open until Sunday” settles all four before anyone has to guess. Read contributing photos to an event gallery once before you send the card to the printer - it is the experience you are handing out, and the card is your only chance to change it.

It is also the natural moment to say something about who would rather not be photographed. Everyone at an event ends up in somebody’s camera roll either way; a shared gallery only makes the destination explicit. A line on the card is a gentler place to raise that than the gallery is.