For the host who chases pictures
The party ends and the photographs scatter across forty phones. A code on the table puts them somewhere instead: one gallery, filling while the cake is still on the stand.
Every birthday produces the same two problems. First, the photographs nobody took: the host spent the day refilling glasses, and the person who did take pictures is on the other side of the country. Second, the photographs that were taken and lost, buried in a chat thread under twenty-five messages about lift times.
Both come from the same cause, which is that nobody agreed where the pictures should go. A page that guests can add to solves it, and it solves it at the point of taking rather than at the point of asking.
The code comes from your event link. Put it on a card at the tables, on the cake stand, or on the wall people walk past, and the party can add to it without anyone asking permission.
Guests scan with their phone camera, choose the pictures, and they go onto the event page. Nothing to install and no account to make.
Pictures arrive while the evening is still happening, so by the time people are looking for coats the room is already collected in one place.
The photographs stay on the phone that took them as well, which is why people are more willing to upload than you would expect.
Half of getting the photographs is setting it up so that the easy thing happens.
The upload is for invited guests opening your link, and a password on the page keeps it that way: the code alone lets people into the party's gallery, so you share the password with the guest list and the photograph collection stays inside it. What the page cannot do is collect the picture nobody uploads.
That is why an open gallery works better than a request. A thing on the table that people scan while they are still holding their drink gets photographs; a message asking them to send you their files when they get home does not.
How it works
Sign up or message Jitabi with the party: a 70th at the boathouse, ninety guests, photographs wanted. The draft page comes with the sections in place, gallery included.
One line near the reply button is enough, and it changes behaviour far more than a reminder on the day will. Publish before you print anything, since a draft gallery is invisible to guests.
The event link prints as a code on paper cards. Make two or three for a big room, put one where people congregate, and hand one to whoever photographs everything anyway.
Pictures arrive as they are taken, alongside the replies and wishes on the same page. The family group can look afterwards without scrolling a chat for the missing ninety per cent.
Questions
No. They scan the code, the page opens in the browser on their phone, they choose pictures and upload. There is no installation step, which matters when your guests range from eleven to eighty-one.
The page lives at a link you send, not in a search result, and you can set a password so only guests you give it to can open it. The printed code alone does not hand the gallery to anybody who wanders in off the internet.
Yes. You are a guest at your own party: open the page and upload from it the same way anyone else would, including the pictures of the room that nobody else photographed.
Nothing guests can see exists until you publish, and that applies to the gallery as much as the invitation. Until then it is a private draft, so build the page, test the code yourself, and publish when you are happy with it.
Some photographs will never make it onto the page, and that is honest to expect. Ask one person per family group to be the uploader for the rest of them, and keep the code somewhere visible rather than in your bag.
Get Started
Put a code on the table, say so in the invitation, and let the pictures arrive while the party is still going.
