Reliability you can check
An evening gets no second take.
An event photo album works a few hours a year, and it works all of them at once: eighty phones on one cell tower, videos running to hundreds of megabytes, a village hall network, and no way to ask your guests to do it again tomorrow.
What matters at that point is not the feature list: it is that nothing breaks, and that it is quick enough that nobody gives up halfway. This page sets out the failures we planned for, what we built for each one, and the efficiency measurements you can redo yourself.
What breaks at a party, and what we built for it
The network drops mid-upload
This is the common one, and it is the one that loses a ten minute video after eight minutes of waiting. A cut upload does not start over: it resumes where it stopped. What makes that possible is an architectural choice rather than an option: the STORAGE itself is the authority on which parts have arrived, so there is no counter to take on trust, and the resume works even if the next request lands on a different server from the last.
Fifty phones upload at once
At the end of an evening, everyone empties their camera roll at the same moment. The files never cross our application: they go from the phone straight to storage, and the application only opens and closes the upload. It never sees a single byte. That is what makes a whole room uploading video a load on the storage layer, which is built for it, rather than on our web servers, which would not be.
A video the other phones cannot play
An iPhone films in a format Chrome and Android will not play. Every uploaded video is therefore reworked in the background so it plays everywhere, with the original kept untouched. That work is a QUEUE, not a gamble: three attempts, with a growing wait between them, and a sentinel that checks on start-up that no video was left behind, including after our infrastructure restarts.
An app to install is one more thing that can fail
An app means an operating system version to demand, a store asking for a password again, and a hundred-odd megabytes to pull down over the room's already loaded network. That is a lot of places for the evening to stop for one guest. With Medley there is nothing to install and no account to create: the QR code opens a web page, a first name is enough. Several services make the opposite choice, which our WedShoots comparison sets out in detail.
Efficiency, measured on 30 August 2026
Under a second to the first image
Measured on our public example album, in the conditions of a party rather than those of a developer's desk: a phone simulated at 393 pixels wide, the network throttled to "Slow 4G" and the processor slowed four times, which is the standard test setting for a mid-range handset. The threshold Google treats as good is two and a half seconds. The page is rendered on our servers and the photos travel inside the response itself: the page source, shown by any browser, already contains the images.
Nothing shifts under your thumb
Layout shift is what makes you tap the wrong button because the page jumped just as you moved. On this album it measures zero. That is not luck: every thumbnail knows its dimensions before the first byte of the image arrives, so its place is reserved and nothing rearranges itself afterwards.
Every phone gets the size it displays
A photo in the album exists in three sizes, and the browser takes the one matching the space it actually occupies on screen: roughly 17 kilobytes for a gallery thumbnail instead of the 122 kilobytes of the large version. On a dense album viewed on a phone, the gap adds up to megabytes that never travel, which is seconds handed back to your guest and mobile data you are not spending on their behalf.
Video follows the room's network
A video uploaded by a guest is prepared in several qualities, and the player moves up or down on its own according to what the network can carry at that moment. It is the mechanism of the large video platforms, applied to a wedding album: nobody picks a quality, nobody sits in front of a spinner, and the video stays watchable when two hundred people pick up their phones at once.
Check it yourself, in three minutes
Open the example album
Go to our example album, which is public and behind no form. It is a real album, served by the same code as the one your guests will open.
Throttle your browser
In Chrome's developer tools, Performance tab: tick mobile mode, choose the "Slow 4G" network preset and the 4x CPU slowdown.
Reload, and read
The tool reports two numbers: the time to paint the largest image, and the cumulative layout shift score. Compare them with what the same measurement gives elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
- Do my guests have to install an app?
- No, never. The QR code opens a web page in the browser already on the phone. There is nothing to download, no app store to get through, and therefore nothing to uninstall after the party. It is also what lets a guest join from any device, including a borrowed phone or a laptop.
- Do my guests have to create an account?
- No. They type a first name, once, so their photos and messages are signed in the album. No password, no e-mail address, no confirmation to go and find in another app. Only the organiser has an account, because the organiser is the one who keeps control of the album.
- What if the venue has terrible reception?
- That is the expected case, not the exception. Photos are served in the size the phone actually displays rather than at full resolution, videos adapt themselves to the available bandwidth, and guest uploads go straight to storage without passing through our application, which avoids the pile-up when fifty phones send their evening at the same moment. An interrupted upload resumes where it stopped.
- What happens if a guest's upload is interrupted?
- It resumes where it stopped, without the guest having to send their video again from the start. The file goes up in parts, and the storage itself is the authority on which parts have already arrived: there is no counter to take on trust, and the resume works even if the next request is handled by a different one of our servers. A dropped connection costs the part in flight, not the whole upload.
- Does it work on an old phone?
- Yes, and that is one more reason not to go through an app: an app demands a recent operating system, whereas a web page opens on just about anything with a browser. Our measurements are in fact taken with the processor slowed four times, which simulates a mid-range handset rather than a new phone.
- How long does it take a guest to upload a photo?
- The journey is three gestures: scan the QR code, type a first name, pick the photos. There is no intermediate step, no welcome screen to get past, and the upload runs while the guest carries on browsing the album.
- Are your figures verifiable?
- Yes, and that is why the example album is public rather than hidden behind a demo request. The measurements published here were taken on 30 August 2026 with Chrome's developer tools, on that same address, and the procedure is described above so you can obtain your own numbers.
Read on
Wedding photo sharing
A QR code on the tables, and every photo your guests took, gathered in full quality.
Collecting the photos your event's guests took
Birthday, seminar, christening, housewarming: the method that works whatever the event, and what changes with the audience.
Event photos hosted in the EU
Where your guests' photos live, who can read them, and how long they stay. Named, not implied.
A WedShoots alternative
WedShoots reviewed, how it works and where it stops: what an album with no app, one price and EU hosting changes.
Your guests will have nothing to install, and nothing to create.
Open your album in two minutes, print the sign, and let the QR code do the rest. Not sure? The example album shows the exact screen your guests will see, and the help pages walk through every step.
Create an album