How to brief guests to take photos you will keep

Why brief guests at all?

Because left alone, a hundred guests take the same photograph. Everyone stands up for the vows and the first dance and points their phone at the same two people from roughly the same place, and you get back seventy versions of one moment and none of the rest of the day. The photos you will treasure in ten years are the ones nobody thought to take: your gran laughing at the table, the children under it, the friends who flew in.

A brief is not a set of rules. It is a few sentences that tell people what you would love to see, and make it easy for them to give it to you.

What should you ask guests to photograph?

• What the photographer cannot see. Your own table, the view from the back of the room, the dance floor from inside it, the speeches from the guests’ side.
• People, not just moments. The guest who has known you longest, the oldest and youngest together, the table that laughed loudest.
• The in-between. Getting ready, the walk to the venue, the queue for the bar, the morning after. Nobody else is there for these.
• Short videos. Ten seconds of a speech or the first dance beats a minute of shaky footage. Videos go into the same album, up to 50 MB each.
• Old photos too. A scan of the two of you as children, the engagement weekend, the hen do. Screenshots and photos of prints upload just as new photos do.

A scavenger hunt turns that list into a game: you write the moments as missions, guests earn points for capturing them, and a leaderboard does the encouraging for you. See twelve photo scavenger hunt ideas and How do I set up the scavenger hunt?

When should you tell guests?

Three times, each short, each somewhere guests are already looking.

• With the invitation. The invitation page carries the date, the place, an add-to-calendar button and a link into the event. One sentence about photos there means nobody hears about it for the first time at 10pm. See What is the invitation page?
• On the tables. A card with the QR code and one line on what you would like. QR code for wedding photos covers printing and placing it, and the free wedding QR code sign maker makes the sign.
• From the microphone. Once, from whoever is giving the first speech or the best man: twenty seconds, after a laugh. It reaches the people who never read a card.

Then, inside the event itself, your welcome message carries the brief for anyone who scans. It is shown under your event name on the page guests land on, with room for up to 1,000 characters; a sentence or two is plenty. See How do I brand my event?

What should the brief actually say?

Each part does a job. The first line says what to photograph. The second removes the reason people do not bother: they assume it means downloading something. The third widens the album beyond the day. Change the words to sound like you; keep the three jobs.

If there are photos you would rather not have, say so kindly in the same place: “Please leave the ceremony to our photographer” works better than a sign that says “No phones”. And if some guests would rather their photos went only to you, tell them about the Make photo public switch: turned off, a photo goes to you and your moderators rather than the shared gallery. See What does “Make photo public” do?

Which habits make a phone photo worth keeping?

Four pieces of general advice that fit on a table card, if you want to give them:

• Wipe the lens. A phone lens lives in a pocket. A quick rub on a sleeve clears the haze from half the evening photos.
• Get closer instead of zooming. Walking two steps nearer keeps more detail than pinching in.
• Turn towards the light. Faces lit by a window or the candles on the table look warm; faces lit from behind look like shadows.
• Hold still for a moment after the tap. Indoors at night most blur is the phone moving, not the subject.

Some photos will still come out soft, and that is fine. Every photo is measured for blur and brightness when it is processed, and Auto-Hide Bad Photos hides the blurry and dark ones in one pass the morning after, without deleting anything. It judges picture quality only, so a candlelit shot you love can be shown again in a tap. See What do Blurry, Dark and Flagged mean?

Should you brief guests after the day as well?

Yes: the morning-after message is the last brief, and often the one that brings in the most. Send the album link once more and ask for anything still on people’s phones. On an upgraded event, attach the highlight reel; a short video of the night does more than any request. See a guest photo highlight reel, the morning after.

Creating the event is free, with up to 30 photos. To keep everything, upgrade that one event with a single payment, Premium £89 for most weddings. See pricing, and weddings on Mosaikin for the rest.