Wedding venue wifi is bad. Plan for it.

A weak venue connection can interrupt guest uploads even when the gallery is working. Check the connection before the wedding and give guests a clear alternative if sending stalls.

Do not assume that a quiet daytime test represents a busy reception. Check the places guests will use and ask the venue how it handles a full room.

Test the wedding venue wifi at the hour it matters

Whatever the venue told you, and whatever it did on the site visit, means very little. You went at eleven in the morning with four people in the building. The condition you care about is a full room at half past ten at night.

The number of connected devices, the access points and other uses of the same connection all affect performance. Ask whether guests use a separate network from the venue’s business systems. There is no single device count at which every router fails.

If you can, test during another wedding. Ask the venue whether you can come by for twenty minutes on a Saturday night, stand where your guests will stand, and try to send a photograph and a short video. That single test tells you more than any answer the venue gives you, and it takes an evening.

If you cannot, ask a narrower question than does the wifi work. Ask how many people it has had on it at once, and whether it is the same connection the till uses. The answers are usually revealing and the venue is usually honest about it.

Mobile data is usually the better bet

Compare mobile data and venue wi-fi where guests will sit. Either can be the better option. Walls, location and the guest’s mobile network affect reception, so a result on your own phone is only one test.

The practical thing this changes is where you put the card. If reception is good outside and poor inside, uploads will happen on the terrace, at the smoking spot and in the car park. A card on the tables is still right, and a second one wherever people naturally step outside is worth printing.

It also changes what you ask for on the night. Photographs go over a weak connection. Video mostly does not, and a guest watching a bar crawl slowly across the screen will give up and never come back to it. If the venue is bad, ask for photographs during the evening and video whenever they get home.

What to put on the card

Put the wifi name and password on the same card as the code. This is the single highest-value thing on this page and it costs one line.

Guests ask for the wifi password at every wedding anyway, usually by interrupting somebody in the wedding party during dinner. Printing it means they never have to ask, and it means the guest who was about to give up on a slow upload has an alternative already in front of them rather than a reason to stop.

Write the password exactly as it is typed, in a font where a one and an l are not the same shape, and put it below the code rather than above it. Above the code belongs to the sentence that says what the code is for, and that line is the one doing the real work.

When an upload is interrupted

A stalled transfer does not mean the original photo has vanished from the guest’s phone. It does mean you should check whether the gallery received it. Ask the guest to keep the files until the upload has confirmed completion.

So it is worth knowing what actually happens. A stalled upload retries with a widening gap between attempts rather than hammering a connection that is already struggling. A batch is uploaded a few files at a time rather than all at once, because forty parallel transfers over one weak link is slower than four. If the server is under pressure it says so and the phone waits, instead of both sides fighting.

Melora tries to keep the screen awake while a batch runs, but browsers and phones can still interrupt background transfers. Keep the page open. If a guest returns after an interruption, the recovery panel can identify files that need selecting again. Larger videos use chunks, so eligible interrupted uploads can resume from completed parts rather than sending every byte again. This is recovery support, not a guarantee that a closed browser will keep uploading.

None of that helps somebody who has already given up, which is why it belongs in this article rather than in a feature list. The mechanics are covered properly in the guide if you want them.

The one thing to tell guests

Say, out loud, that it does not have to happen tonight. That single sentence removes the whole problem for the majority of the room, because the people who fail on venue wifi are not people who cannot send photographs. They are people who tried once, at the worst possible moment, and concluded it was broken.

Current paid Melora events give guests 90 days to upload. The deadline ends contributions rather than immediately removing the gallery. Check the date on your event, particularly for an older package, and make sure uploads have not been paused. All current paid packages have unlimited event storage. The current package comparison lists the other differences.

It also has to be said at the right moment by the right person to land at all, which is a separate and slightly counterintuitive problem.