A wedding hashtag, or a shared gallery?

For about ten years, the answer to collecting guest photos was a hashtag. Pick a phrase nobody else has used, print it on a sign by the door, and search it the following week. It was a genuinely clever use of what existed at the time, and plenty of couples still do it.

It is worth being clear about what changed, because the hashtag did not stop working. What changed is where people keep photos. In 2016 most guests posted to a public feed by default and the search found them. Now a large share of what gets taken at a wedding goes to a private account, a close friends list, a story that expires overnight, or nowhere at all. A tag search can see the first of those and never could see the rest.

So the question is not which one is better. It is which slice of your guests you are willing to lose.

What a wedding hashtag is still good at

It costs nothing and it needs no setup. You agree on a phrase, you print it, and the work is done. Nothing to buy, nothing to configure, and no decision to revisit in the last fortnight when you have run out of patience for decisions.

It is also the only public option here, and that is a feature rather than a compromise. Guests see each other's posts through the night. Someone posts the first dance, three more people post the next twenty minutes, and it builds on itself. A private gallery has none of that. Your guests are uploading into something they cannot see anyone else using.

The wider circle matters too. Cousins who could not travel, colleagues who were not invited, the friend who is eight months pregnant. A hashtag is how those people watch the day happen. A private gallery is closed to them by design, and if being seen is part of what you want from the evening, that is a real loss rather than a technicality.

The five things it never solved

None of these are new. They were true in 2016 as well, and every one of them got worse as accounts got more private.

• Only public accounts contribute. If a guest's profile is private, their photos are invisible to the search no matter how many times they use the tag. That is most people over forty and a growing share of everyone under thirty.
• You get the compressed copy, not the file. What comes back off a social platform has been re-encoded down to a fraction of what the phone recorded. It looks fine on a screen and it disappoints at print size, which is where you will eventually want it.
• Video mostly does not survive. Stories vanish within a day and were never in the tag search to begin with. Anything longer usually never gets posted at all.
• You cannot take anything down. A photo you would rather not have is a conversation with the person who posted it, at some point over the following fortnight, about a photo of you.
• It fades on somebody else's schedule. Tag results thin out over the years and the platform decides when, not you.

The last one is the one couples underestimate. A hashtag is a pointer into a database you do not own. Everything you collected through it exists at the pleasure of a company with no obligation to keep it and no obligation to tell you when it stops.

What a shared gallery trades away, and what it buys

A gallery inverts every line above. It is private by default, it takes the original file rather than a re-encode, it takes video, and you can remove something quietly without anyone being told. It also belongs to you in the sense that matters: the photos sit somewhere you can download in bulk and keep on your own disk.

What it costs is the public half. Nobody outside the room sees anything, there is no momentum from watching other guests post, and you have to put something physical on the table so people know it exists. That last part is real work. A hashtag on a sign by the door is one printed thing. A gallery wants a card on every table, which means printing twelve or twenty of them and putting them out. How the whole thing works is the short version if you have not seen one before.

It also asks the guest for one action they would not otherwise take. Scanning a code is small, but it is not nothing, and a card nobody reads collects nothing at all. Where you put the card decides most of the outcome, and it is the part couples spend the least time on.

How to decide

Answer one question first. Do you mostly want the night to be seen, or do you mostly want to keep it?

If the answer is seen, use a hashtag. Nothing else gives you the public, sociable, everyone-watching version of the evening, and a private gallery will feel flat next to it.

If the answer is keep, use a gallery, and accept that the wider circle will see the photographer's set in six weeks the way they always did.

If you want both, they do not conflict in the slightest. Run the hashtag on a sign by the door and put the cards on the tables. They collect from different people. The hashtag catches the guests who were going to post anyway, and the card catches the ones who never post anything, which is most of the room and the whole reason you are reading this.

What the paid option actually costs

A hashtag is free and a gallery is not, so it is worth putting a number next to it. What we charge is a one-off for the event rather than a subscription, and it lands in the same range as one extra centrepiece or an hour of the photographer's time. That is the honest comparison. Not free against paid, but this against the other thing the money was going to go on.

Whether it is worth it comes back to the first question. If you would be content with the photographer's set plus whatever your friends happened to post publicly, the hashtag is genuinely fine and you should keep the money. If the thought of losing your aunt's photos because her account is private bothers you, this is the cheapest fix for that on the list.