How to share photos from a party: one album for a birthday, a hen do or a baby shower

How do you share photos from a party?

Every party ends the same way. Thirty phones each hold a slice of the night, and the morning after, the group chat fills with a few blurry ones while the best photos stay on the phones of the people who never think to send them. One shared album is the fix for that: one place for everyone’s photos, open from the moment the first guest arrives. Our party photo sharing app page sets out what a party gets.

1. Create the event: a name, a date and the Social Gathering template. Two minutes. See How do I create an event?
2. Share the QR code or the link: in the group chat, on a poster, on the cake table. See How do I get guests into my event?
3. Guests add photos and videos from the browser. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, and nobody is asked for an email address.

The template sets the wording guests see. On a party, the guestbook is called the Quote Board: guests post a memory, a quote or a joke, and can leave the host a private note that only the host and their moderators read. See How do I sign the guestbook?

Milestone birthdays: the 18th, the 21st, the 40th, the 50th

A milestone birthday gathers people from every part of a life: school friends, work friends, family who have not all been in one room for years. Each group takes its own photos, and they rarely see each other’s. One album brings them together, and the birthday girl or boy wakes up to the whole party rather than a dozen fragments.

• The 18th and the 21st. Everyone has a phone out anyway. Give them somewhere better to put the photos than a story that vanishes in a day.
• The 40th and the 50th. Ask guests to bring old photos too. A scan of a school photo or a screenshot of a twenty-year-old holiday uploads just like a new picture, and the slideshow of then-and-now is the moment of the night. See What kinds of photo and video can I upload?
• The scavenger hunt. The Party & Birthday set applies in one click, or write your own missions (“Photo with the oldest guest”), with points and a leaderboard. See How do I set up the scavenger hunt?

Hen and stag weekends, across every venue

A hen or stag do is rarely one evening in one place. It is a train, a cottage, an activity, a restaurant, three bars and a very late breakfast. One event holds the whole trip: one album, one link, shared once in the group chat on the Friday, and everyone adds to the same gallery wherever they are, all weekend.

Signal comes and goes on a weekend away. Photos wait on the guest’s phone and carry on uploading when the connection returns, and videos upload in pieces, so a drop resumes rather than starting again. See What happens if I lose signal?

And some photos from a hen do are not for everyone. A guest can switch off Make photo public for a batch, and those go to the host and their moderators only. The host decides what the bride or groom sees on Monday. See What does “Make photo public” mean?

Baby showers and christenings

These are gentler gatherings, often with grandparents who would never download an app. They do not need to: the phone’s own camera reads the code and opens the album in the browser. Anyone who cannot scan can type the short link instead. See How do I join an event?

For a gathering with a baby at the centre of it, many hosts set the gallery to Protected with access code or Private, so the photos stay with the people who were there. See What do the three gallery privacy settings mean? The Quote Board, meanwhile, becomes a book of wishes for the baby, and the printable PDF of it is a keepsake to put away for them.

The office Christmas do

The work party is where a little care pays off. Every photo and message passes a safety check before it appears, and anything the check is unsure about waits for the host. If you would rather see everything first, switch on Require approval, and nothing reaches the gallery or the screen until you tap approve. See What does Require approval do?

The New Year’s Eve hunt set suits a December party as well as it suits the thirty-first, and, where your plan includes moderators, a colleague can share the reviewing so the organiser gets to enjoy the evening too. See How do I add a moderator? For a larger company event, corporate events on Mosaikin has more.

A slideshow on the telly

Plug a laptop into the television, open the live slideshow from the Live tab, put the browser full-screen and leave it. It updates itself: a photo appears within moments of being published, newest first, so a guest sees their own picture land and the whole room starts taking more. Videos play muted, between six and fifteen seconds each, and once a few photos have likes, the most-loved ones come round again. See How do I run the live slideshow?

Only photos that are public and have passed their check reach the screen, and hiding a photo takes it off the telly at once. The wedding photo wall describes the same slideshow at a bigger occasion.

What you keep afterwards

The morning after is when a party becomes a story. On an upgraded event, send round the highlight reel, an MP4 built from the best-liked photos, and download the whole album as one file, every photo at full display size with camera metadata removed. The Quote Board comes down as a printable PDF, and the word cloud shows the words your guests used most. See What is in the photo archive?

Creating the event is free, with up to 30 photos. A free event is kept for six months after the event date, as the Host Terms set out. To keep every moment, upgrade that one event with a single payment to Plus £25, with room for up to 500 photos; a very big party can go to Premium £89. No subscription, nothing renews, and guests always join free. See pricing.

Still tempted to leave it to the group chat? A WhatsApp group or Mosaikin sets out where each one is the better tool.