Ask HN: What photo sharing solution should we use for our destination wedding?

18 points by pigcat 2 years ago | 33 comments

I am getting married next week on a beach (yay!)

I'd like to collect everyone's photos into a high-res shared album.

100 friends/family are joining and we are all staying at a resort for the week. They will be taking lots of great photos during the week!

We will have a WhatsApp group chat. In my experience folks tend to send their photos there, but the image quality is very poor once it's uploaded to WhatsApp.

My two requirements:

1. Should be very low friction for people to upload. No downloading another app.

2. Images/videos should remain in original/high quality

I am willing to pay for a good solution.

Does anyone have any ideas?

My ideal solution would be a bot that you could add to a WhatsApp group chat. Images uploaded to the WhatsApp group chat also get automatically uploaded in their original quality to a shared google album. I don't think this is possible.

If anyone from WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/etc is reading this, I would pay a lot for a "Pro" account to have high-res photo uploads for my wedding/music festival/travel/etc group chats

solardev 2 years ago |

Set up a Google Photos shared album, and an equivalent iPhone one (don't know how it works there, but presumably they have one?)

Let guests choose which one to upload to.

Do some hourly backend sync between the two. https://www.multcloud.com/tutorials/sync-google-photos-to-ic...

Also, congrats!!

dhruvmittal 2 years ago | |

I asked all of our friends to upload to a Google Photos shared album. Most of my friends use Android and most of my wife's friends use Apple-- didn't hear any complaints about Google Photos. Our experience was that most people have a google account anyways and are familiar enough with Google Photos.

The people I asked for advice said that they'd prefer to download Google Photos to upload/view photos vs. a third-party service that didn't require them to download anything (i.e. Synology photo request).

devoutsalsa 2 years ago | |

For Google Photos, make sure to set the "BACKUP QUALITY FOR PHOTOS & VIDEOS" option to "Original quality". It's the very top radio button under the settings (for my using Google Chrome on my laptop). Can't miss it.

pigcat 2 years ago | |

I hadn't considered setting up two shared albums to meet people on their platform, so thanks for that idea!

ua741 2 years ago | | |

One problem that I often encounter is that people either don't use Google Photos/iCloud, or they don't have sufficient free space in their cloud storage account to upload photos/videos. Additionally, in the case of Google Photos, if the person has configured Standard Quality for their personal account backup, the shared photos will not be in the original quality.

dylan604 2 years ago | | |

You might want to browse through this HN post about Google Drive losing data that's on the front page at the same time your AskHN is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431743

within the comments, there's people also complaining about losing photos as well. just so you're fully informed

h1fra 2 years ago |

I have used https://www.wedshoots.com/ few months ago. Never underestimate your guests to not understand tech or not even bother uploading anything, even if they love you.

If I had to do it again I would stick to WhatsApp and manually ask to get high res for the best pictures.

pigcat 2 years ago | |

Honestly this might be the way. As you correctly pointed out I'm concerned even a Google Photos/iPhoto shared album is too much friction for most people.

solardev 2 years ago | | |

The last couple of weddings I went to just had Polaroids on site (yeah, the old school kind). It was fun for attendees with none of the digital hassles. You can scan them (or not) afterward, but either way you have physical keepsakes, often signed by the guests!

btgeekboy 2 years ago |

We used GuestPix recently, which fulfills both of your requirements - original quality uploads, no apps to download. I’m overall pleased with the site, and the $50 was a drop in the bucket all things considered.

One thing we learned is that even though our crowd is tech savvy, we still had to hound people to upload stuff after the fact.

PaulHoule 2 years ago |

It is something wedding photographers should offer. I've seen wedding photographers expand the traditional model and set up Purikura so people can take their own group photos:

https://www.jrpass.com/blog/say-cheese-the-ultimate-guide-to...

Pro photographers are ideally equipped for some the tough problems in wedding photography (the reception dinner that is poorly lit, large group photos, etc.) but there is going to be a lot of value in gathering and curating guest photos in 2023 and who's in a better place to do it?

I noticed these products

https://www.weddingphotoswap.com/

https://guestpix.com/weddings/

https://weddybird.com/en/photo-gallery

also this discussion

https://www.reddit.com/r/wedding/comments/14mmcqc/best_websi...

Espressosaurus 2 years ago |

I've used a shared google drive or google photos to good enough effect, but that presumes nobody is running short on space.

I've also seen some screwiness however so I'll be watching with interest what other people suggest.

bilekas 2 years ago | |

I was just going to suggest this.. it's one of the easier for non techy people to understand too from what I've noticed.

janci 2 years ago |

I would write few lines of PHP to handle a form with input type=file, upload image to a folder, make a thumbnail and show last 10 photos.

If everybody you need is on Whatsapp, I would probably try to create a read-only group (set posting permissions to you only) and let the PHP script share every uploaded photo to the group with a link to upload more.

xrd 2 years ago |

Immich is really interesting.

I have experimented with it as an alternative to Google Photos. It has a great Android app and the web UI is almost identical to Google. It includes facial recognition (it will group your photos automatically by face, but without sending that data to an advertising company!). I'm really impressed by it.

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

I haven't used the photo sharing features but I see it offered in the UI.

It is really easy to try: you can run it using docker-compose in about two minutes.

The only snag I have noticed is that the Android app will often get updated and that will then cause it to not work with the server. I have never had an issue when I just switched to the newer docker tag and restarted, but that's been a little frustrating. I suppose I should just disable automatic updates of the Android app to prevent this.

Ir0nMan 2 years ago |

While not perfect, you may want to consider Dropbox request links.

You first create a file request link and share this link with everyone. They can go to this link using their phone browser (or a browser on any device) and upload files (full high resolution files). Files automatically go into this "request" folder on your account. You can then share this folder out and have it viewable at another link.

You may want to set up couple URL redirections to these two link like mywedding.com/upload and mywedding.com/shared to make things easier and not have people asking for the link 100 times.

tayo42 2 years ago |

My wife did alot of the work, but she set up a Google drive folder then posted qr codes to the upload link around the venue for people to upload photos too. We emailed the link out a few times.

autoexec 2 years ago |

I'd probably just buy a domain name and throw up a quick webpage for upload. Photos will be whatever size/quality they are when uploaded and galleries can be auto-generated. You can also add updates, maps, apologies, song requests for the reception, or anything else you want to the website. After the wedding you can leave it online forever or zip the whole thing up and store it or even mail copies out to your guests on thumb drives.

anotherhue 2 years ago |

Lightroom has some good functionality here. They'll need to make an account if social sign in doesn't work but only the album owner needs a subscription.

muststopmyths 2 years ago |

>If anyone from WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/etc is reading this, I would pay a lot for a "Pro" account to have high-res photo uploads for my wedding/music festival/travel/etc group chats

Doesn't Telegram allow full-resolution sharing of pictures out of the box ?

Unfortunately, you'll probably get people sharing whichever way they're most comfortable with and have to ask them specifically for originals.

eitally 2 years ago | |

Telegram does allow sharing full-res (both photos and videos)... but you're at the mercy of the end user to select that option at upload time, and I'm not confident this is reasonable.

bilekas 2 years ago | |

Telegram does intact have "lossless" image transfer.. might not be suitable on a mobile device though with space considerations and lack of cloud sync by design.

dvngnt_ 2 years ago | |

I think if you choose file, it will share the uncompressed file vs photo from gallery

werkjohann 2 years ago |

I wouldn’t call Shared Albums in Apple Photos high quality (and certainly not original quality). Unlike in Google Photos, sharing to Apple’s Shared Albums creates a separate scaled down copy of the photo instead of creating permissions to see the original photo.

It’s super frustrating.

janandonly 2 years ago |

Nowadays you can upload HD photos via WhatsApp. That is the easiest solution.

For building projects, we shared photos and videos with Cluster.

See: https://cluster.co/

pigcat 2 years ago | |

Re: WhatsApp - Oh my gosh - you are right! Thank you so much!

It's slightly annoying that it's not possible to set that to default, and I reckon a lot of guests won't remember or bother to change that each time, but it's great to know that.

c22 2 years ago |

You could get a forensic extractor like law enforcement uses and make everyone plug their phone into it before they leave.

apwell23 2 years ago |

please make sure to not leave even a single bit of trash. Hiking trail i visit frequently got taken over by gender reveals, birthday parties and now is full of trash from these parties.

Park service just put a big sign and called it a day.