There are many event photo sharing apps that help you collect photos and videos from your guests. They work by letting guests scan a QR code to access a website, where they can upload their photos. Since guests do not have to download any app, it’s a quick and convenient method.
However, there are several shortcomings to this approach:
- It’s a challenge to get your guests to contribute photos. It can be a fun activity for private and intimate events, such as birthday parties. However, for events in a professional setting (such as conferences), guests are busy with other activities and networking.
- Collecting photos is beneficial for you (the event organiser) because you get a larger pool of images from different perspectives. However, what is the incentive for the guests? Without a clear benefit, guests are unlikely to engage.
- If you have hired an event photographer, that person is the most suited to the job of capturing photos of your event. And you’re getting curated and high quality photos—unlike the photos from your guests, which will vary in quality.
In our opinion, the better approach is quite different from what these event photo sharing apps do. Instead of getting photos from your guests, you should be giving them the photos from your event photographer, in real-time.
- You provide an amazing experience for your guests. Everyone loves beautiful, professionally taken photos of themselves. It’s a meaningful reminder of your event, which guests can share online and with their friends. More importantly, you’re sharing the photos when guests are the most excited, which is during the event itself—not days or weeks after the event.
- You create engagement by showing the photos in a live slideshow, which you can display on a large screen or multiple screens around the venue.
- You generate free marketing and word of mouth for your event, by adding your branding to the photos. Again, people love sharing beautiful photos of themselves, and your brand is taken along for the ride.
Instead of asking your guests to contribute photos, this approach lets you share photos to your guests, in a way that will ultimately benefit you too.
As event photographers, we believe in this approach so much that we built Honcho to help us instantly share photos with guests, via QR code or face recognition. Again, the point is to share the photos instantly, while the event is still happening.
In this article, we’ll explain how Honcho works. Or you can sign up for an account and see for yourself.
Upload Photos Instantly, From Camera to Cloud
Honcho lets your event photographer upload photos while they shoot. The uploaded photos can be viewed instantly in an online gallery, which you can share with your guests.
It’s done by tethering the camera to a smartphone, with the Honcho app installed—the app automatically detects the camera. As your photographer shoots, the photos are transferred to the app, which uploads them to the cloud. This happens very quickly, and high resolution photos are usually uploaded within 5 seconds.
The great thing about Honcho is that it works without any additional equipment. Honcho just needs a camera and phone, and it essentially has unlimited range. This allows your event photographer to cover the whole venue, whether it’s large or small.
Event photos have a shelf life. They are the most valuable during the event itself, when guests are still hyped up and excited. As days and weeks go by, the excitement for the event (and the photos) will diminish. The photos are still great for a recap, but a lot of the emotions that will drive people to share the photos will be gone.
Hence, the best time to share the event photos is right away. Honcho lets you do that in two ways—via QR code or face recognition.
QR Code
Right after your event photographer takes a photo, it will show up in the Honcho app. They can select the photos they want to share, and tap on the Share icon to get the QR code.
By scanning the QR code, guests will open a gallery with just the photos that the photographer selected. It’s a simple and straightforward way to get the photos out of your photographer’s camera, and into your guests’ phones, instantly.
Face Recognition
With Honcho, guests can view all of the event photos in an online gallery. Since your photographer is uploading the photos while they shoot, it means that guests can view them in real-time. This makes a huge difference to their experience, because they are getting their photos when they are the most excited about them.
While guests often enjoy seeing all of the photos from an event, they also want to find their own photos. This used to be a time consuming process, because they had to scroll through the gallery to find the photos.
Honcho simplifies the process to a single step—uploading a selfie. It finds the right photos by matching them to the selfie with face recognition, and delivers them in a personal gallery. Every guest will get a gallery that’s personalised for them, with just their own photos.
This solves a huge problem for event planners—how to share the right photos to the right people. With Honcho, this happens automatically with AI-powered face recognition.
All you have to do is share the link to the online gallery, and this can be done before the event. Many of our clients will print QR codes and place them around the venue.
You might be concerned about sharing all of the event photos publicly, out of respect for your guests’ privacy. Honcho solves this problem by giving you better controls over privacy.
The first option is to set a password for the online gallery, so that only certain people can access it. This is useful if you only intend to share the photos within an exclusive group.
However, we believe that this approach has severe limitations. Again, we’re interested in distributing the photos to all of the guests, not just to a select group.
Honcho offers a simple and elegant solution, by letting you blur all of the photos in the online gallery. Only photos that are found with face recognition are unblurred, which means you can only see your own photos and no one else’s.
This allows you to share the photos publicly with everyone, make sure that every guest will get their own photos, while protecting everyone’s privacy—all at the same time. It’s a unique solution that’s only possible with Honcho.
Create Live Slideshows
We’ve done thousands of events and we know that nothing engages an audience more than a live slideshow. There’s something magical about showing beautiful photos on a large screen, because people love seeing photos of themselves. It raises the energy in a room and gets conversations going.
That’s why we built live slideshows into Honcho, so that you can also create a bit of magic at your events. As your photographer shoots, the photos will go from their camera to the slideshow in real-time.
To start a slideshow, just click on the More button in the online gallery, and select Slideshow. It runs in the browser, so there’s no need to install any software. Hence, you can easily show it on the main venue screen or even on multiple screens around the venue.
Conclusion
There are many missed opportunities with the way we share event photos today. The main problem is that we share the photos too late, often days or weeks after an event. Event photos have a shelf life, and they are the most valuable during an event.
Honcho helps you maximise the value of event photos by sharing them instantly, with QR codes or face recognition. You can share the right photos with the right people with face recognition, while protecting everyone’s privacy. You can play live slideshows to engage your guests and raise their energy.
When photography is used to its full potential, it adds to the experience of your event and generates excitement.
It’s a win-win for both you and your event photographer. Your photographer gets to showcase their photos to everyone, which is highly effective in generating enquiries and referrals for their services.
To top it off, no dedicated hardware is needed, so there’s minimal investment to use Honcho’s game changing features.
Get your event photographer to sign up for an account with Honcho, and make a difference to your event.
