The photos you'll treasure are
on every guest's phone.

A wedding gets a photographer. A christening, a naming day, a baby shower, a big family lunch for a grandparent's eightieth — these get whoever remembers to take their phone out. And yet they're the days most likely to be the last time a particular group of people is in one room.

There's a specific loss that happens here and it's worth naming. The photos of a great-grandparent holding a baby exist on a handful of phones, one of which belongs to someone who doesn't back anything up. Ten years later, when that photo is the one everybody wants, it's on a device in a drawer.

Pooling everything on the day, into one place, is a small piece of admin that turns out to matter enormously later. It costs an afternoon's attention and preserves something no amount of money can reconstruct afterwards.

Family events skew older than most, and that changes what works. Anything requiring an app, an account or a password will collect photos from the under-forties and nobody else — which is precisely backwards, because the older relatives are often the ones with the photographs you most want.

The flow here is four steps with no account anywhere: point the camera at the code, tap the link that appears, choose photos, type a first name. That's within reach of most people who can already take a photo and send a text. The thing that closes the gap entirely is one younger relative sitting with one older relative and doing it once — after which that table generally sorts itself out.

It also helps to leave the short link printed under the code, in a readable size. Some people will always prefer typing an address to pointing a camera at a square, and that's fine.

This is the question that matters most for these events, so here it is plainly. The gallery is private by default. Photos go to your gallery, not to a feed, not to a public page and not anywhere findable — galleries are excluded from search engines entirely and there is no browsable index of them anywhere on the site.

Guests who haven't uploaded can't browse it either; they see an upload prompt rather than the photos. So a link forwarded on to someone you didn't invite doesn't open your child's christening to a stranger.

Nothing becomes shareable unless you decide it should. If you want to send something round, you publish a curated gallery — you choose each photo that goes into it, and even that is protected by a question only people who were there can answer. And everything is permanently deleted a month after the event, so you aren't leaving a permanent online record of a child who didn't get to consent to one.

Every family has them: the aunt with four hundred excellent photographs who has never once sent one to anybody. The trick isn't persistence, it's timing and format. Ask on the day, in the room, when the phone is already out — and give them something to point at rather than an instruction to remember.

The second wave matters just as much here as the first. Send the short link into the family group chat once the following week, and photos will arrive for a fortnight from people who needed to sit down at home and work through their camera roll. That's usually where the grandparents' contributions come from, and often where the single best photo of the day turns up.

One ask, one reminder, then leave it. The gallery stays open for a month after the event date, so there is no rush and no need to chase anybody twice.

Browse everything together first — it's a genuinely lovely hour, and you'll see the day from the angle of every person who was there, each photo signed with whoever took it.

Then unlock and download the full-resolution zip, and this one matters more than for any other kind of event: put it somewhere durable. Not just the phone. A backup drive, a cloud account you actually pay for, a copy sent to another family member. These are the photos that people ask for in twenty years, and twenty years is longer than most storage arrangements survive.

The gallery itself is deleted permanently a month after the event date, with no archive and no way for us to restore it. That's the right privacy default for photos of a child, but it does mean your own copy is the copy that lasts.