The Melora Handbook

Everything starts on one form. The name is what your guests see across the top of the gallery and on the printed card, so write it the way you would write it on an invitation.

The category is not decoration. It decides which QR card design opens first when you go to share the code, and it is the one field worth getting right now rather than later.

• Wedding — two interlocking rings.
• Birthday — balloons.
• Party — sparkles.
• Corporate — a plain ruled header.
• Other — the original card, with no motif.

The event date is the day being celebrated. It is shown to your guests, and it is what your plan's days are counted from — see “How long your gallery stays open” below.

The plans differ in three things: how much you can store, how long the gallery stays open, and whether video and moderation are switched on. They do not differ in how many photographs you may collect — there is no photo count to run out of.

Best adds two things the others do not have. Your own colour on the gallery, with the Melora mark removed if you want it gone — and a person from us watching the gallery during the event itself.

To put the storage in proportion: a photograph from a modern phone is usually 2–5 MB. Fifty gigabytes is thousands of them. Video is what actually consumes a plan: a short clip is 50–90 MB, and one filmed speech can run to several hundred — the plan's storage, not any per-file limit, is the real budget.

The third step decides how open the gallery is. All of it can be changed later, and changing it takes effect immediately — including in the middle of the party.

1. 1

   Allow guest uploads

   Off turns the gallery into a viewing-only album. Useful the day after, when you would rather nothing else arrived.

2. 2

   Require approval

   On means nothing appears until you have seen it. Covered in its own section below, because it changes what your guests experience.

3. 3

   Allow anonymous uploads

   On lets a guest skip the name box. Off asks everyone to say who they are before their first upload.

4. 4

   Photos per guest

   A gentle ceiling so one enthusiastic guest does not fill the gallery on their own. Treat it as a courtesy limit rather than a lock.

Payment happens on melora.app. You are not handed off to another site, and card, Apple Pay and Google Pay all work in the same box. The free tier never reaches the payment step at all.

Your event exists before you pay — it is written down first and switched on when the payment clears. If anything goes wrong mid-payment, nothing is lost and nothing is double-charged. As soon as it clears, an email arrives with your event code, the gallery link and a pointer back to the QR card, in whichever language you signed up in.

A plan's days are counted from the day you are celebrating, not from the day you paid. Booking three months early costs you nothing.

When the window closes the gallery stops accepting new uploads. It does not disappear: you and your guests can still open it, look through it and download from it.

If your date moves, tell us and we will move the window with it. Changing the date in Settings updates what your guests see, but it does not re-date the gallery window on its own.

Melora does not just give you a bare QR code. It draws a finished table card — your names, the instruction, the code, the link written out for anyone whose camera will not cooperate, at print resolution.

Two styles, and the darker one keeps a pale panel behind the code rather than inverting it. That is deliberate: a scanner needs a hard light-to-dark split far more than a code needs to match your stationery, and the room this will be read in is lit by candles.

For the same reason the code itself is never printed in gold. The colour lives in the frame, the type and the paper.

The card design follows the category you picked when you created the event, and you can switch to any of the others at any time.

The card is drawn at 3.5 × 5 inches at 300 dpi — a standard photo print. Print it that size or larger; shrinking it to fit a place card is the one reliable way to make a code hard to scan in low light.

• One on every table, standing up, not lying flat.
• One near the bar, which is where people stand around with a phone already in hand.
• One by the entrance, so guests get it before their hands are full.
• Add a line of your own: “Scan to add your photos” does more than the code alone.

You can also just send the link. Copy it from the same dialog and put it in the group chat — it works exactly like the code, and it is the answer for anyone who could not make it.

A guest points their camera at the card and taps the link that appears. The gallery opens in their browser, with your names, your date and your welcome message.

The name is asked for once and remembered on that phone. It is what appears under their photographs in the gallery. If you left anonymous uploads on, they can skip it.

Tapping Add Photos & Videos opens their own camera roll. They pick as many as they like and the upload starts immediately, with real progress rather than a spinner.

• The same photograph sent twice is stored once. Guests who forward each other pictures cannot fill your gallery with duplicates.
• Photos are rotated the right way up automatically, and camera details — including where the photograph was taken — are stripped before anything is stored.
• The screen can lock mid-upload without killing it, and if the connection drops the phone remembers what it had not finished.

iPhones shoot in HEIC, which Melora cannot read. In practice this almost never comes up: when a photo is chosen through the normal picker, iOS converts it to JPEG on the way out. If a guest does hit it, they are told the format is the problem rather than being shown a generic failure.

There is a microphone button beside the upload button. It records a short message — the thing a guest would have said in a card, said out loud, at the time.

Voice notes are private to you. They never appear in the gallery grid, no other guest can browse them, and they are not included in the archive a guest downloads. They are a message to the couple, not a post.

The gallery fills up as the evening goes on, without anybody refreshing anything. Guests can open any photograph full screen, and mark the ones they like — privately, on their own phone.

A guest can save a single photograph, and — if you have left it on — download the whole gallery. What they get is the full-resolution original, not the smaller copy the screen was showing.

Signing in at melora.app gives you every event you have, with how many photographs are in each and how many people have opened the gallery.

Opening an event gives you the detail: the count, the views, how much of your storage is gone, and every photograph that has arrived.

If you switched Require approval on, every upload waits for you. Nothing a guest sends is visible to anyone else until you have looked at it.

Approval is worth thinking about before the day rather than during it. It is the right call for a corporate event and usually the wrong one for a wedding, where the point is that photographs appear while everybody is still in the room.

Settings is reachable from the event page and everything in it takes effect immediately — no re-printing, no new code. The event code never changes.

• A welcome message, shown across your cover photograph.
• A cover photograph, chosen from what has already been uploaded.
• Whether guests may download, and whether they may take the whole gallery at once.
• Whether names appear under photographs.
• Newest or oldest first.
• On Best, your own colour and whether the Melora mark stays on the page.

If you pick a cover photograph while approval is on, approve that photograph too. An unapproved cover is not shown to guests, and the gallery falls back to its plain backdrop.

Download All Photos on the event page builds a single archive of the gallery at full resolution and sends it to you as one file. On a large gallery it takes a little while to assemble — that is the archive being built, not a stall.

Individual photographs can be saved one at a time from the gallery too. Either way what you get is the original your guest's phone produced, not the smaller copy used for display.

Do this once while the gallery is still open, even though nothing is deleted when the window closes. A copy you actually hold is worth more than one you can still reach.

Three kinds of thing end up in a Melora gallery and they are not treated alike. This is the whole rule:

1. 1

   A guest says the code will not scan

   Check the card is standing up and not in shadow, and that it was printed at full size. Failing that, the link is written on the card underneath the code — they can type that instead.

2. 2

   A guest's video will not upload

   Anything over 2 GB is refused, and even a long 4K clip rarely reaches that. Large videos upload in pieces and carry on from where they stopped if the connection drops — so a clip that fails outright is usually a format problem rather than a size one. Ask what kind of file it is.

3. 3

   Uploads stopped part way through

   Venue wifi. The phone remembers what did not finish and offers those files again when the gallery is reopened — and it checks with us first, so a guest is never asked to re-send something that actually arrived.

4. 4

   A photograph is in the gallery that should not be

   Open the event, find it in the photo list and delete it. It goes immediately, for everyone.

5. 5

   Nothing is appearing at all

   Check that guest uploads are still switched on in Settings, and that the gallery window has not closed. Both are on the event page.

6. 6

   The gallery says the event has ended

   The window has run out. Everything is still there to look at and download; get in touch and we can reopen it.

Anything else, write to us. A reply from a person is part of what you paid for.