How many pictures will actually come in?

"Will the storage be enough?" is the second question people ask us. The first is "how many pictures actually come in?", and there is no number for that, only a calculation with four dials.

The back-of-the-envelope version

Work in three steps, each with a range rather than a figure:

1. How many guests upload at all? A third to a half of the people present is realistic. Not because the others do not want to. They do not get round to it, forget, or assume it is somebody else's job.
2. How many pictures each? Whoever starts rarely uploads a single picture. Five to fifteen is the rule, individual guests reach sixty.
3. Multiply. Eighty guests, thirty of them active, times eight pictures: around 250. With photo tasks and a screen in the room, more like 400 to 600.

That is an estimate, not a promise. But it is closer to reality than "eighty guests, eighty pictures", and above all it shows where you can turn the dials.

The four things that really move the number

• The announcement. The biggest lever by far. A gallery that only exists on a sign gets used by the curious. One that was mentioned out loud once gets used by everyone else too.
• Where the QR code sits. On the table, where people look while waiting for food, not at the entrance, where everyone is holding a coat and a present.
• The screen. Seeing your picture on the wall two minutes later makes you upload the next one. It is the strongest amplifier after the announcement.
• Photo tasks. They give a reason to shoot to the people who would not shoot on their own, and they produce the pictures that are otherwise missing.

What that means for storage and downloads

A phone photo is two to five megabytes, a video 60 to 400 per minute. A typical wedding with 400 pictures and twenty short videos therefore lands somewhere around two to five gigabytes.

For you that mainly means one thing: the complete ZIP is a big file. Download it over Wi-Fi, not on the move, and expect the packing to take a few minutes. There is no limit on the number here, not per guest, not in total.

And if it becomes too many?

That is not a problem, it is the normal case, and it is the reason for two things in the gallery: you can hide individual pictures without deleting them (they stay in your archive), and you can sort the collection by time, guest or task instead of scrolling through it in one go.

The only point where the amount really counts is the beginning: the first ten items are the free trial. Every photo and every video counts towards it, including hidden ones and ones still awaiting approval. After that the number does not matter.

What an event costs.