Photos live on the screen: what works in the room

The Live Wall is your gallery on the big screen: the moment a guest uploads a picture, it appears at the front of the room within seconds. It needs no login, just a browser in full screen, and it is the most effective advertising the gallery has. People upload when they can see that uploading does something.

Where the screen belongs

Not where something else is happening. A screen behind the couple competes with the couple; one next to the band competes with the band. What works is the traffic: next to the bar, opposite the buffet, on the way to the toilets. Somebody is standing around there every twenty minutes anyway, looking at something.

Two practical things that go wrong more often than the technology: a projector loses against daylight. For a lunchtime party a large TV is the better choice. And the laptop feeding the screen has to be on mains power and must not fall asleep; nobody who is dancing notices a black screen at ten in the evening.

What should be on the wall

The QR code belongs on it. The wall shows what the gallery does, and the code next to it says how to join in. The two together are the reason the wall works at all. Without the code it is pretty decoration.

There are three arrangements: one single large picture, a raster of rows and columns, or rows built from the pictures' real aspect ratios. For a big hall the single picture is often better because you can still make it out from ten metres away; for a TV at the side the raster feels more alive, because something is happening somewhere all the time.

Why the wall does not sort by portrait and landscape

It sounds like a detail, but it is the decision that makes the wall fair: our wall never looks for a picture that fits a free slot's shape. When a picture's turn comes, in it goes, and the whole row re-settles. Neighbours get wider or narrower, the row height moves with them.

The reason: three quarters of a wedding gallery is portrait. A wall that picks by shape shows the few landscape pictures again and again and the portrait ones never. Whoever uploaded theirs then waits all evening for nothing.

Who gets a turn

Fresh uploads are favoured, but per person. If somebody dumps a hundred holiday pictures at once, they still get one slot per round, otherwise the wall belongs to them for twenty minutes. Much-liked pictures are lifted onto a stage in between and then slotted back in. And tapping a tile on a touchscreen brings exactly that picture to the front.

Videos play along muted, from a random offset and for at most half a minute. A video that has not buffered yet is not shown, better one picture more than a stuttering start in front of eighty people.

The emergency brake

There is exactly one picture nobody wants on a six-metre screen, and you never know in advance which one. So: hide it in the dashboard, and within seconds it is gone from the wall. The wall keeps asking what is still valid. For a company party or a very large wedding, switch on approval before publication as well.

How the Live Wall is set up, and here is a real gallery to click through.