A wedding photo wall that fills itself from your guests’ phones

What is a wedding photo wall, and how is it different from a hashtag wall?

A hashtag wall pulls public posts from a social network. It needs guests to post publicly, it shows whatever the hashtag catches, strangers included, and it went quiet when people stopped posting their evenings. A photo wall built on a shared album takes photos straight from guests’ phones into one gallery you control, and shows them on a screen in the room. Nothing goes on social media unless the guest puts it there.

With Mosaikin the wall is the live slideshow of your event. Open it in a browser on whatever drives the screen, put it full-screen, and leave it. See How do I run the live slideshow?

How does the photo wall fill itself?

The slideshow holds an open connection to your event, so a photo appears within moments of being published and nobody refreshes anything. The newest photo comes first, so the guest who just took it sees it arrive, which is the moment the table notices and joins in.

• Most loved. Once five photos have a like, every sixth slide is one of the five most-liked, labelled with its count.
• Videos play too, muted, for between six and fifteen seconds each; the full clip stays in the gallery.
• Launch it in 4K from the Live tab, or from the Live Event card on the Overview: it is the same button.

What can reach the screen?

Only photos that are public and have passed their check. A guest’s photo is cleaned of its location data, checked, and only then published; anything the check is unsure about waits for you instead of appearing. Switch on Require approval and nothing reaches the wall until you have seen it. See Are photos checked before they appear?

Hide a photo and it leaves the screen at once, even if it is the one being shown. Auto-Hide Bad Photos clears blurry and dark shots without deleting them. Anyone in the room can report a photo from the gallery, with no account. See How do I hide or delete a photo? and What is Auto-Hide Bad Photos?

What does the venue need?

• Any screen with a browser behind it. A laptop on an HDMI lead, a TV stick, the venue’s own system. There is no box to hire.
• A connection for that browser. The wall needs to stay online to receive photos. Guests’ uploads wait out a dropped signal on their own phones; the laptop driving the screen cannot, so a phone hotspot beside it is the usual insurance.
• Sleep turned off on the machine driving the screen.
• A test on the real screen before the day: scan your own code on a phone that is not signed in, add a photo, and watch it arrive. See What should I check before the event starts?

Put the QR code on the wall itself as well as on the tables: people who watch photos arriving want to add theirs, and the code on screen tells them how. A sentence from the person with the microphone does the rest. For printing and placing the code, see QR code for wedding photos.

If photos are reaching the gallery but not the screen, the screen’s browser has lost its connection: reload the page and it catches up. See The slideshow is not showing new photos. Everything else about the day is on weddings on Mosaikin, and the same wall at a festival or a venue night is on a live photo wall for big nights.