What your guests see

Worth reading once, because you will be asked. Guests have no app, no login and no account: they scan, type their name, and shoot.

Joining

The QR opens a page with the event name and how many shots they get, and asks for their name, so your Guests tab shows whose shots are whose. It is just a label: no account, no email, no phone number.

Some phones forget a guest between scans, the code scanner in an iPhone's Control Center for one. When that happens the guest types the same name and goes straight back to the roll they already had, so they carry on with the shots they had left instead of starting over. For the photos taken before, a phone that carries on this way is treated like any other guest: it sees only what everyone sees and cannot delete them. So typing someone else's name gets nobody anything. A guest who wants one of those earlier photos removed asks you, and you delete it from the Gallery tab. Each name belongs to one guest per event. A guest who shares a name with someone already there lands on that person's roll with a "Welcome back, Sarah" line, taps Not you? right there, and adds a last name or nickname.

Tapping Start Shooting opens the camera. The browser asks for camera permission once.

The camera

A viewfinder, a shutter, and a counter showing how many shots are left. Around it: front and back cameras, flash, aspect ratio, filters previewed live, pinch to zoom, a self-timer and a composition grid. Their choices are remembered for next time, so a guest who sets things up once is not doing it again on every shot.

After a shot they get a moment to keep it or discard it. A discarded shot does not count against their roll, and it never reaches you.

Uploading instead of shooting

There is an Upload from gallery control, so a guest can send a photo from their camera roll rather than taking one in the app. Two things follow from that, and both are worth knowing:

• An uploaded photo spends a shot from their roll like any other, and goes through the same screening.
• Not every photo in your Drive was necessarily taken during the event. If that matters to you, say so when you share the link. There is no setting that turns it off.

It exists because a phone that will not grant camera access still has a camera, and a guest with a broken permission is otherwise locked out entirely.

Sharing the event

Guests get a Share this event control with the join link, so someone who arrived can pull in the friend beside them without going back to your poster.

Running out of film

The counter hits zero and the shutter stops. What happens next is your setting, from the Guests tab: with auto-refill on they silently get five more and carry on, and with it off they see a message asking you for more.

Their gallery

Guests can see the event gallery from the camera screen. They can look through what everyone shot, and they get two controls over their own photos:

• Delete. They can remove a photo they took. It goes from the gallery and from your Drive.
• Video clips. On paid events, guests can record up to 3 short clips with sound from the same camera. A clip is visible only to its owner until you approve it in the Review tab.
• "Let others download my photos". Each guest decides whether other people can save their shots, from the sliders icon on their own gallery. It is on unless they turn it off, so the usual case is that photos can be saved; a guest who wants theirs look-only turns it off. That is why one photo can be downloadable and the next one not.

They can also report a photo. A reported photo goes straight to your Review tab for you to decide on.

If the host approves photos first

Some hosts turn on approval, so nothing reaches the shared gallery until they release it. Guests are not told which way an event is set up, and nothing about shooting changes.

What they will notice is the gallery filling up later, or in batches, rather than shot by shot. Their own photos are still there immediately, because they took them.

After the event ends

The camera closes and nobody new can join. Guests who already joined keep access to the gallery, so people can still look at the night afterwards.