Rehber

Deciding

Finding the right photo app for your wedding

The prices look similar, the offers do not. Seven questions separate them more reliably than any feature list. And hardly anyone asks the first one.

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Basics

Collecting guest photos: four ways compared

Group chat, shared album, USB stick, gallery link. Each one has a point where it breaks. Here they are.

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Switching

From a group chat to a gallery

The group was quick to set up and useless after two days. How to move without losing the pictures already in it.

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Planning

How many pictures will actually come in?

Eighty guests do not mean eighty pictures. An honest back-of-the-envelope calculation, and the four things that really move the number.

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Practice

QR codes at a wedding: what actually works

The code is on the wall and still nobody uploads. That is almost never the technology. It is where it hangs and what stands next to it.

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Practice

When the QR code will not scan: the short link

At every party there are the two people whose camera recognises nothing. The typeable address on the sign is for them, and it has to be printed properly.

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Practice

Guests without smartphones: the 80th birthday

Half the room is over seventy, two have a feature phone and one says "me and the internet". How the pictures still come together.

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Security

The access code: when it helps and what it cannot do

A word in front of the gallery keeps forwarded links out. It does not stop a picture a guest already downloaded, and that difference matters.

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Ideas

Photo tasks: the game that brings the best pictures

Ten small assignments, a progress bar and a leaderboard turn into a game that runs all evening. Which tasks work, and which ones are just embarrassing.

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Practice

Photos live on the screen: what works in the room

A wall of pictures that keeps turning over all evening. Where the projector goes, what should be on it, and why the wall must not sort by portrait and landscape.

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Practice

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

Renting a photo booth costs several hundred euros an evening. A tablet costs nothing extra. What you actually get, where the difference really lies, and when renting is still the right call.

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Practice

Song requests at a party: the list that saves the night

Slips of paper on the booth, shouted requests at half past one and a DJ who cannot hear a thing. How to collect song requests without everyone ending up disappointed.

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Ideas

The spoken guest book: voices last longer than sentences

Written entries get short, spoken ones get honest. What a voice guest book gives you, where it fails, and how you keep the recordings.

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Design

Photo looks: why eighty cameras need not look like eighty

Every phone has its own opinion about skin tones. A shared look turns the jumble into a gallery, without losing a single original.

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Technical

Guest videos: what works, what jams, what helps

Videos are the first thing that breaks in photo apps. Why that is, which limits are real, and how to get your guests through the upload.

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Practice

Photographer and guest photos: making both fit

The professional pictures arrive in six weeks, the phone pictures in six seconds. Both belong in the same place, without one devaluing the other.

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Company events

Photos at a company party: the rules are different

Summer party, anniversary, Christmas dinner: what is charming at a wedding is delicate at work. Four points to settle beforehand.

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Clubs

Club events and tournaments: pictures from many pitches

Three pitches, six teams, forty parents with phones. How to turn that into a collection the club can still use at the end of the year.

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Occasion

Christening and communion: pictures from a quiet day

No DJ, no projector, thirty people and a child at the centre of it without having been asked. What runs differently here than at a wedding.

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Occasion

New Year's Eve: pictures of the night nobody remembers

Between the fondue and the fireworks the best pictures of the year happen. And on 2 January they vanish into fourteen camera rolls.

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Occasion

Photos at a memorial: a quiet guide

This is not about documenting the service. It is about the pictures from forty years sitting in forty phones that would otherwise never come together.

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Afterwards

After the party: save, sort, give away

The day after, three hundred pictures are sitting there and nobody knows where to put them. A plan for the first week and for the rest of the year.

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Practice

When somebody wants a picture out of the gallery

This request almost always comes, usually the day after and usually embarrassed. It takes ten seconds if you know beforehand which button is which.

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Law

Wedding photos and privacy: what you should know

Collecting photos of guests means processing personal data. Less dramatic than it sounds. But it has consequences.

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