Google Drive
Sharing event photos through Google Drive
Why your own Google Drive is the right home for event photos, what a Drive-first tool can and cannot see, and how to share the folder at full quality.
Most event photo tools store your photos on their own servers and let you fetch them later. Papped does the opposite: every photo lands in your own Google Drive as it is taken, and Papped keeps nothing. This guide explains why that matters, what it means in practice, and how to share the folder with people afterwards without turning your photos into WhatsApp thumbnails.
Why Drive, and not a provider's servers
Photos of your wedding or your company offsite are yours. When they sit on a provider's servers you have them for as long as the provider exists, stays in business, and keeps its pricing the same. When they sit in your Drive you have them the way you have everything else there: permanently, in full quality, under your own account.
There is a second reason. A tool that does not store your photos cannot leak them, sell them, train on them or lock them behind a paywall later. The simplest privacy promise is not storing the data in the first place.
What Papped can and cannot see in your Drive
When you connect Google Drive, Papped asks for the narrowest permission Google offers: it can create files and folders, and it can see the files it created. It cannot see anything else in your Drive. Not your documents, not your other photos, not your other folders. If you later disconnect it, the folders it made stay where they are, as ordinary files that belong to you.
For each event Papped creates one folder in your Drive, named after the event, with two folders inside it: one for small thumbnails the gallery uses, and one called "Pending review" where clips wait for your approval. Delivered photos sit in the event folder itself as full-size originals.
How to share event photos through Google Drive
- Connect the Drive you want the photos in. Use the account that should own the pictures for good. For a wedding that is usually one of the couple. For a company event it is a work account, so the photos stay with the company if the organizer moves on.
- Run the event. Every screened photo is written to the folder as it is taken. There is nothing to export afterwards. Open the folder during the evening and watch it fill.
- Share the folder, not the photos. In Drive, right-click the event folder and share it with the people who should have everything: your partner, your parents, your photographer. They get the originals, not a compressed copy, and any photo you add later appears for them too.
- Use the gallery for everyone else. Guests already have a shared gallery from the QR code, viewable for 30 days after the event ends. They can browse it and download their own photos, and others' where the owner allows it, so you do not need to share the Drive folder with two hundred people.
- Move or copy as you like. The folder is an ordinary Drive folder. Drag it into your Photos, back it up, put it in a shared drive at work. Papped does not need to be involved again.
Keeping the quality
Group chats compress photos hard. A photo that leaves a phone at twelve megapixels arrives in a WhatsApp group at a fraction of that, and every forward makes it worse. Drive stores what it is given. Share a folder link instead of forwarding photos and everyone gets the same file the guest took.
Questions people ask
Does Papped store a copy anywhere?
No, with one deliberate exception. If the automatic screening is unsure about a photo, that photo is held encrypted for at most 48 hours so you can approve or reject it. Approved photos are delivered to your Drive and the held copy is removed; rejected ones are deleted. Video clips are never stored by Papped at all; they stream straight into the "Pending review" folder in your Drive.
What if my Drive is nearly full?
Papped checks how much space the event might need when you create it and warns you if your Drive looks tight. A full wedding of photos is usually a few gigabytes; video is much larger, which is why clips are limited per guest.
Can two people own the photos?
Share the folder with the second person in Drive and they have everything. Co-organizers in Papped can also run the event with you, and on a big event you can nominate a co-organizer's Drive as the backup for video clips.
What happens if I disconnect Drive later?
Nothing to the photos. They are yours, in your account. Papped simply loses the ability to add new files, which only matters while an event is running.
More detail on the permission and the folder layout is in Your Drive: where photos go, and the Photos to your Drive page has the short version.