Share your wedding photosas one album link

One link, 800 photos, nothing to install

A wedding set is not a file, it is a pile — 600 to 1,500 frames between the two phones, the photographer, and whoever was holding a camera at the reception. Sent as files, that pile is unshareable: too big to email, too many to message, too awkward to hand around on a drive. As an album link it is one tap. The guest sees a grid, scrolls it, taps a photo to open it full size, and saves the ones they want.

The 'nothing to install' part is the whole point when half your guest list is over sixty. There is no app store detour, no 'create an account to continue', no cookie wall between a great-aunt and the photo of her dancing. It is a web page. If she can open a news article on her phone, she can open your album.

Why Google Drive becomes a support job at a wedding

Drive is the default answer and it fails in four specific, predictable ways. First: sharing permissions. Half your guests are signed into a work Google account that their IT department has locked down, so your 'anyone with the link' folder greets them with a request-access screen — and those requests land in your inbox, on your honeymoon.

None of those are Drive being bad software. They are Drive being a work-document tool pointed at a consumer audience it was never designed for. An album link has one job and no account model, so there is nothing to misconfigure.

• Request-access emails. Every guest whose browser is signed into the wrong Google account generates one, and only you can clear them.
• The preview is not the photo. Drive shows a downscaled render in the viewer; getting the real file means Download, which on a phone means a zip, which on an iPad means nothing at all.
• Bulk download arrives as a ZIP. A relative on an iPad genuinely cannot open it without extra software, and will not ask you how — they will just give up quietly.
• Folder structure leaks. Guests can see file names, sub-folders, and sometimes the other things sitting near that folder in your Drive.

WhatsApp and iMessage are quietly wrecking your photos

Send a wedding photo through a chat app and it does not arrive as the photo you sent. Chat apps recompress images hard to keep messages small — a 4 MB JPEG typically comes out the other side around a few hundred kilobytes, with a long edge resized down and visible mush in the skin tones and the dark parts of the dance floor. It looks fine on the phone that received it and falls apart the moment anyone tries to print it.

There is a workaround — attach the photo as a document rather than as an image — and roughly nobody uses it, including the guests you would need to teach. A link sidesteps the argument: what you uploaded is what we serve back, byte for byte. The chat app only ever carries the URL, so there is nothing for it to compress.

This is the single most common reason couples end up re-sending photos months later, when someone wants a print of the one good group shot and discovers the version in their camera roll is 900 pixels wide.

The link you post on the morning of the wedding, and keep feeding

Photos do not arrive all at once. The phone shots exist that night, the photographer's selects land in two or three weeks, and someone's uncle emails you eleven more in April. A normal share means a new message each time and a guest list that ends up holding four different links, three of which are stale.

Here the album is the thing you share and the files inside it are what changes. Add the photographer's delivery and the URL you posted in February shows it. Delete the twelve blurry ones and the link quietly stops showing them. The address never changes, so the message in the group chat, the QR on the thank-you card, and the line in the wedding email all stay correct forever.

Honest and important: guests cannot upload into your album. There is no guest-contribution feature here, and we would rather say so than let you find out after the wedding. The workflow that actually works is collection-then-post — ask people to AirDrop or send you their favourites in the group chat, and add the good ones yourself in one sitting a week later. It is fifteen minutes of work and you get to be the editor, which is usually what you wanted anyway.

A QR code for the table cards and the thank-you notes

Every link comes with a downloadable QR code, which turns out to be the best way to reach the guests who are not in any of your group chats. Put it on the table cards on the night, or on the thank-you notes afterwards with a line like 'the photos live here'.

• Size it for the distance. The rough working rule for QR codes is a 1:10 ratio — a code read from 30 cm away needs to be about 3 cm across, one read from across a room needs to be much bigger than people expect.
• Keep the quiet zone. Leave a clear margin around four modules wide (the blank border) or scanners struggle. Do not print the code tight against a border or a photo.
• Test the actual print, not the screen. Scan the proof at final size, in the dim light the venue will actually have, with two different phones.
• A printed code survives an edit. Because you replace what is behind the link rather than the link itself, a card printed in June still works after you have added a hundred photos in July.

Private-ish, said honestly

An album link is unlisted, not secret. We do not index it, it is not in a search engine, and nobody guesses the address — but anybody who has the URL can open it, and any guest can forward it. For most weddings that is exactly right: you want it to be effortless for two hundred people you invited to your wedding.

If you want more than that, Pro adds a password on the link and an expiry date, and you can disable a link outright at any time from your dashboard, which takes it offline immediately. What a password does is stop a forwarded URL from working on its own. What it cannot do is stop a guest who is already inside from screenshotting a photo or re-sharing what they downloaded. No link-sharing tool can, and any tool that tells you otherwise is selling you a feeling.

Our plain recommendation: leave it open for the general set, and if there is a subset you are genuinely private about, make that a second album with a password and share the password separately.

What it costs to keep a wedding set online

Here is the honest arithmetic, because a wedding is the one case where the free plan genuinely will not do it. Free gives you 20 links and 100 MB of storage in total. A single full-resolution wedding photo from a modern camera is commonly 5–15 MB, so 100 MB is somewhere between ten and twenty photos. Free is for trying the flow, not for hosting your wedding.

Free links run on a renewable window rather than living forever; a paid plan or a keepalive is what makes an album permanent.

• Pro ($7/month, $29/year, or $49 once) gives you 10 GB of storage, 200 MB per file, unlimited albums, and the password / expiry / custom-name controls.
• A one-off album keepalive is the cheaper route if this is the only thing you will ever host with us: $8.99 keeps one album alive for a year with a 1 GB storage grant, $15.99 does it permanently with 3 GB. It buys hosting for that album only — no password, no analytics.
• Any single album is capped at 500 MB, so a very large set is best split — 'ceremony', 'reception', 'the photographer's gallery' — which is how guests want to browse it anyway.
• Practical middle path: upload web-resolution versions (long edge ~2,500px) for the shareable album and keep the RAW originals on a drive. It cuts the storage by an order of magnitude and no guest will ever notice.