Guide
How do you get the photos your wedding guests took?
By Max Bryselbout · Updated August 2026
It ends the same way at every wedding: the best photographs of the day are asleep in a hundred phones, and nobody ever sees them again. Here are the six methods couples actually use, and the one rule that separates them, so you can choose knowingly, before the day or after it.
The rule that settles everything else
Every couple who has been through it says the same thing: the fewer steps there are, the more photos you get. Each piece of friction (installing an app, creating an account, remembering a web address) removes a slice of your guests. Keep that yardstick in mind through the six methods below.
The friction has a number attached to it. Reckon on three to five photos from each guest who plays along, so a few hundred for a wedding of a hundred people. What separates a thin album from a full one is therefore not how many photos were taken, but how many guests actually upload. The arithmetic is laid out in how many photos a wedding guest takes.
1. The group chat
Everyone's first instinct. WhatsApp, iMessage, Messenger: your guests are already there, a group takes a minute to create, and the photos start arriving on their own. That is its strength, and very nearly all of it.
A messaging app is built to send a picture quickly, so it compresses photos and videos hard. Memories drown between two messages about parking, and getting a hundred photos back means saving them one at a time. Guests outside the group (colleagues, distant family, the friend on a different platform) never take part at all. Our full read is on WhatsApp for event photos.
2. The shared folder (Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud)
The serious workaround. An open folder, the link sent to your guests, sometimes a QR code made with a free generator: it works, and the quality survives intact.
The limits show up in use. Depending on the settings, guests need an account to upload (that is also the ceiling of a shared Google Photos album), and nothing about a file manager makes anyone want to join in: empty folders, duplicates, files called IMG_4521, and no album to leaf through.
3. WeTransfer
The one-off send. Excellent when your photographer delivers their files to you. For collecting from fifty guests it is the need turned inside out: every guest has to create their own transfer to your address, and free links expire within days, so open one too late and it is gone. The detail is in our comparison of WeTransfer for an event.
4. The Instagram hashtag
The pretty public wall. A hashtag in your names, and the photos appear on the feed. Good fun during the party, but everything is public, compressed and limited to those who post, which is to say a minority of the room. The photos stay at Instagram, not with you, and nobody in their forties is going to open an account for the occasion.
5. The USB stick on the night
The method from before. A laptop at the back of the room, everyone comes and plugs their phone in. In theory. In practice nobody leaves the dance floor to queue at a computer, and the photos taken after midnight, which are often the best ones, never make it onto the stick.
6. The shared album behind a QR code
The method built for the job, and the shortest one by the rule above. You create the album before the wedding and put its QR code on the tables. Guests point their phone camera at it, the album opens in the browser, and each of them uploads photos and videos in a few seconds, with no app and no account. The original quality is kept, everything lands in the same place, and anyone can download the whole album.
That is what Medley does for your wedding, and the mechanics are set out in our guide to the photo QR code. The same link also carries a guest book, where a guest leaves a written note, records their voice or films themselves for a minute: the one thing none of the other five methods brings home. In fairness, it does not fill itself. Without a word from the DJ or a line on the sign it stays as empty as the notebook by the door. It is all described on our wedding guest book page.
On price, to place it: Medley is in its test phase: unlimited photos and videos, in original quality, Live slideshow included, and nothing to pay. The album is kept at least until December 31, 2026. The detail is on the pricing page.
And if the wedding has already happened?
The album works just as well afterwards. Create it, send the link round your groups and by message (“put your photos in here, we want all of them”): it is enormously more effective than chasing each guest for a transfer. One message, one link, and the photos arrive over the following days in the quality they were shot in. The full catch-up, sample message included, is in sharing the photos after the wedding.