Venue WiFi is terrible. How photo uploads on venue WiFi survive it

Why is venue WiFi so bad for photos?

Wedding venues are old barns, stone halls, country houses with walls a metre thick, and marquees in the middle of a field. They are chosen for how they look, not for their signal. Then a hundred people arrive at once, all on the same network, all wanting to send photos at the same moment: straight after the vows, the first dance, the cake. A connection that copes with a quiet Tuesday gives up on a Saturday night.

You cannot fix the venue. What you can do is choose a way of collecting photos that does not need the venue to behave. That is what the Mosaikin upload screen was built around, and it is worth knowing how, because it tells you what to do and what not to worry about on the day.

What happens to a photo when the signal drops?

• It stays on the guest’s phone. Photos a guest has chosen are stored on their own device until they are saved to the event, so going offline, locking the phone or reloading the page does not lose them. A banner says the phone is offline and that uploading will resume by itself.
• It goes on its own. Each photo uploads separately, so one failure does not take the rest of the batch with it.
• It tries again. A failed photo is retried automatically a few times, and then offers a Retry upload button the guest can tap.
• It is small before it leaves. Anything longer than 4096 pixels on its longest edge is scaled down and re-saved as a JPEG in the guest’s browser before it is sent, so a photo from a large phone camera finishes quickly even on a weak connection.

Videos are sent exactly as recorded, up to 50 MB each, which is why they are uploaded in chunks rather than in one go. A clip that loses the connection at ninety per cent resumes from there, not from the start. See What happens if I lose signal halfway through uploading? and Can I upload a video?

What about a guest sending two hundred photos at once?

That is the guest you want, and the screen is built for them. A guest can choose up to 1,000 photos from their library in one go. They are saved twenty at a time, each batch sent and saved automatically, and the page shows how many are saved out of how many. The only thing the guest needs to do is keep the page open until it says it is done. See Is there a limit on how many photos I can add?

If the page is closed part-way, the photos already in the tray are kept on the phone, but a web page cannot reopen the rest of a selection on its own. The page says how many still need choosing; the guest chooses the same photos again and any already saved are skipped. If someone tries to leave while photos are still going, the browser warns them first.

Limits on how fast one guest can upload are per guest, not per network. At a venue where everyone shares one WiFi, one enthusiastic photographer cannot use up the room’s allowance. See Why am I being told to slow down?

Which connection does the host need to worry about?

Only one: the machine driving the slideshow. Guests’ photos can wait out a dropped signal on their own phones. The laptop or stick behind the venue screen cannot, because it holds an open connection to the event to receive new photos as they are published. If that connection breaks, the screen stops updating while the gallery carries on filling.

• Give the screen its own connection where you can: a cable to the venue router, or a phone hotspot beside the laptop. It is the usual insurance, and it costs nothing.
• Turn sleep off on the machine, so it does not drop the connection itself.
• If the screen stops changing, reload the slideshow page and it catches up. See The slideshow is not showing new photos.

Everything else about running the screen is in How do I run the live slideshow? and the wedding photo wall.

What should guests be told?

Very little, which is the point. One line from the person with the microphone does it: “If the signal is bad, add your photos anyway; they will send themselves when it comes back.” Two smaller things help:

• Use the normal browser, not a private window. Private and incognito windows restrict the storage that keeps unsent photos on the phone. Photos already saved are never affected.
• A reasonably current phone. The floor is Safari 16.4 and Chrome 111 and their equivalents: in practice, any phone that has had a system update in the last couple of years. See Which browsers and phones does Mosaikin work on?

A guest who wants to look back at their own photos on the train home, with no signal at all, can: thumbnails of the photos they added are kept on their phone, and Your photos opens offline. See Can I see my photos when I have no signal?

What if guests only get signal on the way home?

Then that is when their photos arrive. The album stays open after the day, and anything added later joins the same gallery. For a venue with no signal at all, send the link again the next morning and ask everyone to add what they took; it is as good a nudge as any.

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.