After the party: save, sort, give away

The day after, three hundred pictures are sitting in the gallery, you slept four hours, and somebody is already asking where to download the photos. The good news: almost nothing has to be decided this week. Only one thing is urgent.

Day 1: save, do not sort

Download the complete ZIP. Do not select, do not edit, do not delete, just save. It holds every photo and video in original quality, the voice messages from the guest book, and also the pictures you hid or that are still waiting for approval.

Then put that file in two places. A laptop is not a backup, and neither is a single external drive. Two places, one of them not in your flat, is the only rule worth remembering here.

Days 2 to 7: serve the guests

"Can I have the pictures?" is guaranteed, usually in a group chat where it then gets asked five times. Two answers:

• The gallery link is the answer. Every guest can download each individual picture in original quality there anyway. Nothing else is needed.
• The bulk download takes care of the rest. Switch it on and guests take everything in one go instead of four hundred taps. It only contains what is visible to guests. Hidden pictures stay out.

Send the link round again about a week later. That is the second wave: people who did not manage it on the night upload then, and in many galleries a noticeable share of the pictures arrives that way. As long as the upload window is running, that needs nothing from you.

The weeks after: sort, but kindly

At some point you will go through it all. A few notes from a lot of galleries:

• Hide instead of delete. A hidden picture is gone for guests immediately but stays in your archive. That is almost always the right response to an unfortunate photo. It is still yours.
• The likes are a pre-selection. What many people liked is rarely what you would have picked first, which is exactly what makes it interesting.
• Always print from the originals. What the gallery displays is sized for screens. In the ZIP the shot sits exactly as the phone took it.

At the end of the runtime

Depending on the plan the gallery stays visible for 6, 12 or 24 months. After that you automatically get a link to one final complete archive, valid for four weeks, and then the data is deleted. That is deliberate: a gallery running somewhere forever is not a gift, it is an open invoice.

If you have the ZIP from day one, that date is a calendar entry and nothing more.

Which plan keeps things how long.