Wedding photo challenges for guests

The idea is good and the paper version of it is where it dies. A list on a table is read once, by the people who were going to take photographs anyway.

What is a wedding photo challenge?

A list of shots you ask your guests to go and get — the groom before he sees you, somebody crying, the table nobody photographed. It exists because a photographer cannot be in four rooms at once and your guests already have the cameras. The usual version is a printed card on each table, sometimes called a photo scavenger hunt.

Why do printed photo scavenger hunts usually fail?

Because a card asks people to remember a list for six hours. It is read at the start, when there is nothing to photograph yet, and by the time the moment it describes is actually happening the card is under a plate. The four people who were always going to take photographs do it and nobody else does — which is the same four people you already had.

How is this different from a photo challenge list?

The timing. Nothing is printed and nothing has to be remembered: each prompt arrives on a guest's phone at the moment it is about, and goes away afterwards. “Find the person watching them like it is the first time” is a strange thing to read on a card at five o'clock and an obvious thing to be asked during the first dance.

Do different guests get different challenges?

Yes, and that is the part a printed list cannot do. The same prompt going to everybody is forty photographs of one thing. Each moment's prompts are spread across the room, so a moment comes back from several places at once — the wide one from the balcony, the close one from the floor, the face of somebody watching.

Can I write my own challenges?

All of them, if you want. Every night arrives with a run of show already written for the kind of event it is, and every prompt in it can be rewritten, removed or added to. Most hosts change a handful and leave the rest.

Do guests need an app to take part?

No. They scan one QR code and the whole thing runs in the browser that was already open on their phone. No download, no account, no password — which is the other half of why a paper list fails, because anything that needs installing gets installed by nobody.

What happens to the photographs afterwards?

They come back as one album: the evening as a timeline, everyone who was in it, and every photograph at full resolution. There is a short film of the night in there too, cut from what came back, which you make with one press when you are sure nothing else is still arriving.