For most people, sharing event photos means a shared Google Photos album. It costs nothing, most guests already know it, and for a birthday dinner with thirty photos it is genuinely the right tool. This article is about what happens as the event gets bigger, and it starts with what Google Photos does well, because it does a lot.
What a shared album does well
- •It is free to start and most guests have used it before.
- •Link sharing uses an unguessable URL, and you can reset the link by turning link sharing off and on again, after which the old link stops working.
- •With Collaborate on, guests can add their own photos and videos to the same album. You can turn it off if you want the album to be view-only.
- •It handles video as well as photos, which FotoMe AI does not.
Where it stops working for events
The first limit is finding yourself. Google Photos does group faces, but its own help pages say face groups and labels are visible only to the account owner, and face groups are not shared when you share photos. So the photographer can find everyone; a guest opening the shared album cannot search it for their own face. In an album of three thousand wedding photos, each guest scrolls past hundreds of strangers to find their dozen frames, or messages you asking for them.
The second is storage. Photos in your Google account count against your account's storage, and the free 15 GB is shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos. A season of full-resolution event work fills it quickly, and every event you have ever shared keeps using your quota until you delete it.
The third is control. Anyone with access to a shared album can add other people to it. And Google notes that if you remove someone from a shared album while link sharing is on, anyone with the original link can still view it, so the real off-switch is resetting the link. That is manageable for a family album and awkward for a corporate event or a school.
The last is presentation. A shared album is your personal account's album. There is no studio branding, no cover, and no way to make it look like the delivery a client paid for.
What an event gallery does differently
- •Each guest finds their own photos. They open the link in a phone browser, take a selfie, and see only the photos they appear in, with no app and no account.
- •Private galleries sit behind a PIN, which you can regenerate if it leaks.
- •Storage belongs to the event, not your personal account, and the gallery closes and deletes its photos and face data at the end of its window.
- •The gallery carries your studio branding, cover photo and design.
- •Guests can contribute their own photos, but into an approval queue: nothing appears until you approve it.
What it costs
Google Photos is free up to your account's storage, with paid Google One plans for more. FotoMe AI is priced per event: free for up to 375 photos, then from ₹499 for up to 3,000 photos, up to ₹9,999 for 60,000. For a small private event, a shared album is cheaper and good enough. Paying per event makes sense when the photos are your work, the guest list is in the hundreds, and the question you are tired of answering is "can you send me the ones with me in them?"
A simple rule
- •Under fifty people, mostly friends, and you are not the hired photographer: use a shared album.
- •Hundreds of guests, a client paying for delivery, or photos of children or employees: use an event gallery with face search and a PIN.
- •You want video in the same place: keep a shared album for the video, since FotoMe AI is photos only.