A DIY photo booth: what a tablet can do, and what it cannot

Renting a photo booth costs somewhere between 300 and 500 euros for one evening, depending on the supplier and the region, plus set-up, plus an appointment for somebody to arrive and collect it again. A tablet you already own costs nothing extra. So the question is not whether it can be done cheaper, but what you lose along the way, and what you do not.

What a tablet turns into

Technically a photo booth is surprisingly little: a camera pointed at people, a countdown you can read from three metres away, several shots in a row, and a choice afterwards. A browser can do all of that. You stand a tablet up, open your gallery address on it, allow the camera once, done. No app, no account on the device, no login for your guests.

The rest of a rented booth is a shell, a ring light, a box of props, a printer and a person standing next to it. Those are worth thinking about one at a time, because they are not equally important.

The difference that matters: light

Of all of them, light makes the biggest difference. A front camera in a darkened room at eleven at night produces a grainy picture, and no software trick changes that. If you rebuild one thing from the photo booth kit, make it this: a bright lamp pointing at people from the front, not from the ceiling and not from behind. An ordinary floor lamp with a pale shade goes further than you would think.

The second difference is the printer. If you want a strip people can take home, you really do need a rented booth. That is the one point where a tablet has nothing to offer. The prop box, on the other hand, you can put together yourself for twenty euros, and the person standing next to it is replaced by one sentence on the start screen.

What comes out of it

What comes out is exactly the framing you saw on screen. The booth does not quietly save a different picture from the one you posed for. The size depends on the device and lands at roughly two to eight megapixels, a measured two on an iPad, considerably more on tablets with a larger sensor. For the gallery, a phone and the big screen it is plenty either way; for a large print on a wall it is tight. If you plan to print later, know that beforehand, and lean on the photos from your guests’ phones instead, which run through the same gallery and are considerably larger.

One side effect almost nobody expects: pictures from a browser camera carry no capture data at all. No location, no coordinates, no device serial. Phone photos are different. They bring all of that with them, which is why we strip it from every published version.

Three things it fails on

The screen goes dark. A tablet falls asleep after a few minutes, and then there is a black slab nobody taps any more. Our photo booth page keeps the screen awake as far as the device allows, but do not rely on that alone: plug it in and raise the screen lock timeout in the system settings.

Somebody leaves the page. A tablet in a room full of people is a tablet somebody will eventually poke at. Both systems have exactly the right function for this: “Guided Access” on an iPad (in the accessibility settings), app pinning on Android. Either one nails the device to this one page until you release it with a code. That is two minutes while setting up, and the difference between a station and a problem.

The camera question comes at the wrong moment. The browser asks once whether it may use the camera. That question should be put to you while you are setting the device up, not to the first guest who picks it up at nine in the evening and has to guess.

Where to put it

At chest height, a little away from the wall, not facing a window. And not where something else is already happening: a photo booth next to the dance floor gets overlooked, one next to the guest book or on the way to the bar does not. People stand around waiting there anyway.

The point where it beats a real booth

A rented booth writes to a memory card. You see what is on it the week after. Here, the pictures your guests keep are in the same gallery as every phone photo of the evening seconds later, and if a Live Wall is running, they are up on the wall of the room shortly after that. That is precisely the moment that sends the next group over to the booth.

One thing to do beforehand

Photo booth pictures are ordinary uploads and count towards the ten free ones. If you set the booth up on the night without having unlocked your event first, it stops after the first round, in the middle of the party, at the device a small queue has just formed at. So pay beforehand, not afterwards.

The photo booth is included from the Premium plan up. Here is a real gallery to click through.