A wedding photographer covers the day. The guests cover the rest: the speeches from the back of the room, the dance floor at one in the morning, the table that never made it into a group shot. Those photos end up in two hundred camera rolls and a WhatsApp group that compresses everything, and the couple rarely sees most of them. A QR code on the tables can gather them into one place. This guide covers how that works, what to put on the sign, and why nothing a guest sends should appear until someone has looked at it.
One code, two jobs
A wedding QR code can do two different things. It can deliver the photographer's photos to each guest, and it can collect the guests' own photos for the couple. A plain shared album only does the second, and turns into one long feed every guest has to scroll through. In FotoMe AI the same code does both, in that order: the guest finds the photos they appear in first, then adds their own from the same page.
What a guest does
- 01Scans the code on the sign. The gallery opens in the phone's browser, with no app to install and no account to create. If the gallery is private, they enter the PIN from the sign first.
- 02Takes a selfie and sees the photos they appear in.
- 03Taps "Add your photos" on that page and picks photos from their camera roll, up to 20 at a time. JPG and PNG are accepted.
- 04Done. The photos go into a review queue, and no other guest sees them until the photographer approves them.
The upload sits after the selfie on purpose. A guest who has just seen forty photos of themselves understands what the gallery is for, and is far more likely to give something back than a guest asked to upload at the door before they have seen anything.
Why approval comes first at a wedding
Anyone who can see the sign can upload, so an open upload album is only as good as its worst photo. Review first means the couple's gallery stays curated:
- •Blurry, dark and near-identical shots never reach the gallery.
- •Photos the couple would rather not share, such as a guest who had too much to drink or a moment meant to stay private, can be turned down.
- •A rejected photo is deleted from storage, not just hidden from view.
- •A photo a guest already sent is recognised and skipped, so the queue does not fill with duplicates when someone picks the same camera roll twice.
Review happens in one place, with bulk approve and reject, so a few hundred guest photos take minutes rather than an evening.
What happens once a photo is approved
An approved guest photo joins the gallery like any of the photographer's own. It is indexed by face, so a guest who appears in someone else's phone photo finds it with the same selfie they already took. Guests who asked to be emailed about new photos of themselves are told when one arrives. That second point is what turns guest uploads from a dump into something useful: the cousin who was in the background of thirty phone photos gets all thirty, without anyone tagging them.
Approved guest photos count against the event's plan exactly like the photographer's uploads. Photos still waiting for review do not, so a guest pressing send cannot use up the plan.
Setting it up
- 01Create the event before the wedding so the link and code exist before anything is printed.
- 02Turn on guest uploads in the event's settings. It is off by default, and set per event, so it is only on for weddings where you want it.
- 03Choose public or private. Most weddings are private: guests enter a PIN before they can open the gallery.
- 04Download the poster, which carries the code, the PIN and the steps. Print the A4 version for the tables and share the square version in the wedding group chat.
- 05Add one line to the table card or welcome message: "Took photos? Add them from the same page." Guests do not look for an upload button they have not been told about.
- 06After the wedding, work through the review queue, then send the gallery link again once the photographer's photos are in. Guests who come back for those are the ones who upload next.
The companion guide on sharing wedding photos by QR code covers where to place the sign and how to keep a PIN-protected gallery private when the PIN is printed on it.
What it does not do
- •Video. Guest uploads are photos only, JPG and PNG.
- •Upload without the selfie. The upload button lives on the guest's own photos page, so a guest who only wants to send photos still takes the selfie first.
- •Publish instantly. Nothing a guest sends is visible to other guests until it is approved. That is the point, but it means somebody has to review the queue.