What happens to your photos when a photo app shuts down

What happened to WedPics, Eversnap and Veri?

All three were guest-photo apps that couples trusted with their wedding. All three are gone. The details below come from the companies’ own announcements and from reporting at the time; each is listed in the sources at the end.

None of this is a story about bad people. Small apps are bought, folded into something larger and switched off, or simply stop paying for themselves. It happens across the whole category, and it will happen again. The question worth asking of any service, ours included, is what you are left holding when it does.

What should you do if your photo app is closing?

• Download everything today, while it still works. Do not wait for the final week, when everyone else is trying to do the same.
• Check your email for an export or download link from the service; closure notices often carry one.
• Ask your guests. The originals of most guest photos are still on the phones that took them. A message to the family chat asking for anything from the day often recovers more than the app held.
• Be wary of the old address. Once a service has gone, its domain can end up serving something else entirely. Do not sign in or download from a link that no longer looks like the service you used.
• Make two copies. One on a computer or drive at home, one somewhere else: a cloud folder you pay for, or a drive kept by a relative.

If the app has already gone and the download window has closed, the guests’ phones are the place left to look. Starting a fresh shared album and asking everyone to add what they still have is often the quickest way to rebuild most of the day.

What should you ask before you choose a photo app?

• Can I download everything, in one go, at full size? Not one photo at a time, and not only the public ones.
• What happens if you close? Look for a stated notice period, not reassurance.
• How long is my album kept? A stated period you can plan around beats “for ever”, which nobody can promise.
• Who owns the company, and where is it? A named company, registered somewhere you can look it up.

What does Mosaikin promise if it ever closes?

We do not promise your photographs will sit on our servers for ever. Services in this category do close, sometimes at short notice, and a promise nobody could keep is worse than an honest one. What we guarantee instead is that you can always hold your own copy:

• Notice before we stop. If Mosaikin ever stops operating, hosts are given 12 months of notice, and the archive download keeps working for the whole of it.
• A stated archive period. An upgraded event’s archive stays available for 5 years after the event.
• Your own copy, always. One click, one file, on the first screen of the event dashboard rather than in a menu.

See What happens to my photos if Mosaikin ever closes? and How long do I have to download my photos?. Who runs Mosaikin, and where it is registered, is on Trust and safety.

What is actually in your copy?

On an upgraded event, the archive is one ZIP of every photo on the event, not only the public ones, at full display size, up to 4096 pixels on the longest edge. Each file is named after the guest who took it, with camera metadata including location removed. If anything could not be included, a file called MISSING-PHOTOS.txt inside the archive names it, so an incomplete download never passes for a complete one. See What is in the photo archive?

The guestbook comes as a typeset PDF, and the highlight reel as an MP4: ordinary files that open on any computer, with nothing of ours needed to read them. Download them the week after the event, put them with the things you would hate to lose, and every promise on this page stops mattering to you.

Creating an event is free; upgrading one is a single payment, Premium £89 for most weddings, with no subscription. See pricing and weddings on Mosaikin.