Guests scan a QR code, upload from the browser, and every photo and video lands in a folder you already own. No app, no guest login, no gallery that expires. These guides cover the setup, the organizing, and the trade-offs against apps that rent you server space.
Last updated: 17 September 2026.
Most event photo apps store your guests' photos on their servers and close the gallery after 3 to 12 months. EventSnap uses the storage you already have: a Google account comes with 15 GB, the median wedding in our data uses about 0.4 GB, and the files stay yours for as long as you keep them. Numbers behind that on the wedding photo statistics page.
From zero to a printed QR code. Start with the first guide if you are new to this.
The core method: one QR code, guests upload from the browser, every file lands in a folder you own. Start here.
Step by step for a wedding: create the event, print the code, what guests see, where the photos end up.
Why Google Drive beats rented galleries for a wedding, and the setup that takes ten minutes.
Why a shared folder still asks guests to sign in, the five reasons uploads fail, and the fix.
What happens between the scan and the file appearing in your Drive, and what we never store.
What to do with 500 photos the morning after, and how to keep them findable years later.
Per-guest and per-moment folders, smart file names, and how to switch it on.
Sorting, deduplicating, sharing back with guests, and archiving without losing quality.
Search, filters, shared albums and long-term archiving for large galleries.
HEIC vs JPEG, 4K video sizes, and how to keep your Drive storage under control.
Shared folders, Dropbox, The Knot albums and rented galleries, compared honestly.
Sign-in walls, wrong-folder uploads and the 2 GB mystery: what goes wrong with a plain shared folder.
File requests, storage costs and guest friction compared, and why neither works well on its own.
What The Knot keeps, what expires, and how a Drive-first setup differs.
Rented galleries that expire versus storage you already own, with the real numbers.
The same method applied to specific occasions.
A QR code on the gift table collects every guest photo without an app.
Catch every reaction from every angle, in full resolution.
Open houses and parties with many guests: one code, one folder.
No. With EventSnap guests scan a QR code and upload from their browser. EventSnap writes the files into your Drive on their behalf using a permission limited to files it created. A plain shared Drive folder, by contrast, asks every guest to sign in.
Yes, uploads count against your Google storage, not the guest's. In our data the median wedding uses about 0.4 GB and nine in ten stay under 2 GB, so a free 15 GB account is usually enough.
No. Photos are stored exactly as the guest's phone took them. Large videos are re-encoded on the phone before upload to a smaller file at the same resolution so they finish on venue Wi-Fi.
Nothing. They are ordinary files in a folder in your own Google Drive. There is no gallery that expires and nothing to export.
50 uploads on the Starter plan, no card needed. Every photo goes straight to your Google Drive.
Create your free event