What free wedding photo sharing gets you

Search for a way to collect photographs from your guests and most of what comes back says free. Most of it is telling the truth. Every one of those services also has to pay for storage and bandwidth, so the free version stops somewhere, and the only question that matters is whether it stops before or after your wedding does.

This is not an argument that you should pay. Plenty of weddings are genuinely served by a free tier. It is an argument that you should find the edge of one deliberately, three weeks early, rather than at eleven at night with a hundred people in the room.

The five places free wedding photo sharing stops

Almost every free tier draws its line in one of five places, and knowing which one you are looking at takes about two minutes on a pricing page.

• A number of photographs. Fifty uploads, or a hundred, counted across the whole event rather than per guest. Simple to understand and the easiest to blow through, because the count is consumed by whoever uploads first.
• An amount of storage. A number of megabytes or gigabytes. Harder to picture, but fairer, because a guest sending three photographs uses less of it than one sending a two minute video.
• A length of time. The gallery is free for seven days, or thirty, and then it closes or the download stops working. This is the one people forget, because the clock starts when you create the event rather than on the wedding day.
• What you get back. The gallery is free, the full resolution copies are not. Sometimes the free download is a smaller version, sometimes it carries a mark, sometimes taking everything at once is the paid part.
• What the guest has to do. A free tier that requires the guest to make an account is cheaper for the operator and much more expensive for you, because that is exactly where people give up.

None of these are dishonest. They are just different shapes, and a shape that suits a christening with twelve guests can be the wrong shape entirely for a wedding with a hundred and twenty.

The limit that bites on the night

Whichever limit you are on, it is reached during the reception, and it is reached faster than couples plan for. How many photographs guests actually take is the number to plan against, and it is consistently higher than the guess. A room of a hundred people with phones is not a room of a hundred photographs.

Video is what accelerates it. A single minute of phone video can weigh more than fifty photographs, so a storage allowance that looked generous in photographs disappears the moment somebody uploads the speeches. If a free tier includes video, check the allowance again with that in mind. If it excludes video, that is arguably more honest, as long as the guest is told rather than left watching a failed upload.

The failure mode is the part worth thinking about. When the limit is hit, does the guest see a clear message, or a spinner that never finishes? Does the couple get told, that night, while it can still be fixed? A cap that fails quietly means the first you know is when you count the photographs a week later and they stop at nine in the evening.

Check what you can get back out

This is the one to check hardest, because it is the one that cannot be fixed afterwards. The photographs are the entire point, and a gallery you cannot fully download is a rental rather than a collection.

Three specific questions. Are the downloads the original files or a resized copy, and if it is a copy, what size. Is there a mark on them, and does that mark come off if you pay. Can you take the whole gallery in one archive, or only one photograph at a time, which is a very long evening at four hundred photographs.

Then ask the question underneath all three: when the free period ends, what happens to the files. Some services keep the gallery and close the door. Some delete. Either is defensible if it is stated plainly, and a service that will not say is telling you something.

Who a free tier is genuinely right for

It is worth saying plainly, because most writing on this subject is trying to move you onto a paid plan and the honest answer is that plenty of events do not need one.

A free tier is the right answer for a small event where the total volume is genuinely low. Twenty people at a registry office and a lunch afterwards will not produce the load of a hundred and twenty at a reception running to three in the morning, and a modest allowance covers it comfortably. It is also right for the events around the wedding rather than the wedding itself: an engagement party, a rehearsal dinner, a second celebration for the people who could not travel.

And it is the right way to find out whether any of this suits you at all. Run a free event for something small, with real guests and real phones, before you commit to anything for the day that cannot be repeated. You will learn more in one evening than from any amount of comparison, and what you learn is usually about your guests rather than about the software.

Where a free tier is the wrong answer is a full wedding with video, because that is the combination every allowance is sized against. If your evening includes speeches that somebody will film, assume the free version runs out during them.

Test it three weeks early

Ten minutes with a real phone will tell you more than any comparison table. Create the event, print or screenshot the code, and hand it to somebody who is not you and does not know what it is meant to do.

Watch what happens without helping. Does the camera recognise the code, or does it need an app. Is the upload screen open in one tap, or is there a sign-up in the way. Send one photograph and one video. Then, from your own side, download what arrived and open the file. Check the pixel dimensions against the original on the phone, because that comparison answers the resolution question definitively and nothing on a pricing page does.

Do this on the venue wifi if you can get access, or on a deliberately bad connection if you cannot. The thing that fails at a wedding is almost never the service. It is the building.

Where ours stops, in plain numbers

Melora's free tier is a real gallery rather than a trial with a timer. It never expires, so the event stays open indefinitely, and the limit is storage rather than a countdown.

That storage allowance is twenty megabytes, which is a handful of photographs from a modern phone and not a wedding. It is deliberately enough to see the whole thing working end to end and not enough to run an event on. Video is not included on the free tier. Neither is the approval queue, the live updating gallery, or taking the entire gallery as one archive, though you can save individual photographs at full quality.

What is not restricted, on any tier including the free one, is quality. There is no mark on anything, and a download is the original file the phone sent, not a resized copy. That is a flat fact about the product rather than a feature of a plan, and it is the line we would not want to be on the wrong side of. What a paid event costs is one payment for the event rather than a subscription, and what each tier actually switches on is the same list as above, in the other direction.