Photo booths have been a staple at events for a long time, and understandably so. They are an amazing way to provide entertainment for your guests, and bring groups of people together for a social activity. The resulting photos and prints are also meaningful keepsakes for your guests.
If you’re running a photo booth, you will understand that the photo booth software can make or break the experience. You want software that can perform reliably when you’re taking a large number of photos. It should also offer a few key features that are expected from any photo booth, such as instant sharing, custom borders to brand the photos, an easy way to manage prints, and live slideshows.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the 9 best photo booth software that you can buy today. There are two main categories for photo booth software—running either on Windows or iPads. We’ll cover options from both categories and talk about their pros and cons.
Why should you listen to us? Because we’ve been running our own photo booth and event photography company (at Ubersnap) since 2016. When it comes to photo booths, we know our stuff.
Honcho
Honcho helps photographers instantly upload and share their photos with clients and guests, while they shoot—creating an amazing experience for events, weddings and high-volume headshot sessions. While it’s designed with photography in mind, it can also be used for photo booths. After all, you can think of photo booths as photographers who stay in one spot (while providing a backdrop and props), instead of roaming the venue.
Honcho is available on all platforms—iOS, Android and web—and can be used on any device. Since it’s cloud-based, you can set up your event on any device and it will be synced across all the other devices, making it easy to manage your events.
Here’s how Honcho works. First, it lets you upload your photos from camera to cloud, while you shoot. This is done by tethering your camera to your smartphone, with the Honcho app installed. The photos are automatically transferred to the app and uploaded to the cloud, and they can be instantly viewed in an online gallery.
Once the photos are uploaded, you can share them in two ways—AI-powered face recognition or QR codes. For face recognition, your guests will just upload a selfie, and Honcho will automatically find their photos by matching them with the selfie.
Honcho gives you full control over privacy. It lets you password protect the online gallery, so that only selected people have access to it.
Alternatively, you can blur all of the photos in the 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. Hence, you can freely share the online gallery, while maintaining everyone’s privacy.
In addition, Honcho lets you add custom borders to the photos, create live slideshows and print wirelessly, all from a single platform. Again, you can manage your events from any device and work in teams, with all of the photos and settings synced up automatically.
Many photo booth companies provide photography services too, because there are events and weddings that require both services—it’s just a common sense way for these companies to diversify their services. The opposite is also true—many photographers also end up offering photo booth services.
Honcho is the only software on this list that’s flexible enough to do the job for both. For event and wedding photography, it lets you instantly upload and share your photos, while still roaming the venue freely (in some places, it’s called roaming photography or roaming photo booth). For photo booths, it provides a system that’s easy to set up and reliable to use, and includes all of the key features that are important for a good photo booth experience.
dslrBooth
dslrBooth is a versatile photo booth software that runs on Windows, and it can be used to provide a variety of experiences, from the standard photo booth to the 360 booth. It can connect with DSLRs, and Canon and Nikon mirrorless cameras.
All photo booth software have essentially the same workflow, and dslrBooth is no exception. You start a countdown, take a photo, let guests download the photos by scanning a QR code or entering their contact information (email or phone number), and choose how many copies to print. Then you start all over again for the next group of guests.
dslrBooth provides a good balance between ease of use and flexibility. It’s relatively painless to set up an event, and it supports a wide range of requirements—such as green screen photo booths or video guestbooks. You can customize the screens and print templates, add custom borders, and share the photos with email, SMS or QR code.
In summary, dslrBooth is a versatile photo booth software that can cover most use cases. If you’re looking to offer different types of experiences, it’s a good all-in-one solution.
Darkroom Booth
Darkroom Booth is one of the oldest players in the market, and it shows in their photo booth software. It’s packed with a huge number of features and customization options, almost like Photoshop for photo booths.
But like Photoshop, it comes with a steep learning curve. It can be difficult to troubleshoot because of how complicated it can get—fortunately, they provide plenty of learning resources and have a responsive customer support team.
The flip side is that it has just about every feature you can think of, and many features that you never thought to have. This is useful because over time, you will encounter clients with special requests. Chances are Darkroom Booth can support that unique requirement.
Darkroom Booth runs on Windows, and you will have to set up the event and run the photo booth on the same device. It works on a one-off license, which means that you can purchase the software outright. When new versions come out, they offer upgrades at discounted prices.
Breeze Systems
There are different versions of Breeze Booth for different configurations—Windows + DSLR, Windows + Webcam, and iPad or iPhone.
Generally, iPad-based photo booths are easier to manage than Windows-based booths, for a couple of reasons. iPads are usually more reliable than Windows devices and easier to keep up to date. The last thing you want is for your Windows booth to install an update in the middle of an event—which has happened to us! iPad-based photo booth software also tends to be simpler than Windows software, so you’re trading flexibility and customization for ease of use.
Regardless of the version you choose, you will get the expected features with Breeze Booth—customization options, different experiences from GIFs to green screens, and instant sharing via email or SMS.
The unique feature that only Breeze Booth offers is the ability to integrate with third party software, via auto hot key scripting and accessing data via XML. If these terms mean something to you and you have the technical expertise, you can use Breeze Booth as the base to build custom solutions.
Snappic
Snappic offers photo booth software for the iPad and iPhone. You’re not just restricted to using the iPad or iPhone camera—you can connect Canon and Nikon cameras with a USB connection. Obviously, this is important if you care about image quality.
With Snappic, you can create a variety of experiences with just your iPad—from the standard photo booth to boomerang or video booths.
The team behind Snappic is usually good at staying on top of the latest trends, and pushing new features as the technology becomes available. Some of their latest features include AI background removal, automatic video templates (to create interesting video content) and upcoming support for generative AI filters.
That said, Snappic comes at a rather hefty price tag. It’s one of the most expensive options on this list, and its pricing makes it accessible for only the more established photo booth companies. It’s a good option if you’re looking to create a more unique experience with their latest features.
Simple Booth
This is a case where a company’s positioning can be found in their name. Simple Booth offers an iPad-based photo booth software that is simple to use. It also sells physical hardware called HALO, which is essentially a sleek photo booth shell for your iPad, with an integrated ring light. However, you can use their software without purchasing their hardware.
Simple Booth’s ease of use comes from not offering too many features. It provides the standard photo or GIF experience, the option to instantly share the images via QR code, and forms to collect user information. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support external cameras, and you have to use the iPad camera. If image quality is important to you, this could be a deal breaker.
Simple Booth’s target market isn’t just photo booth companies, but also businesses that want to install a photo booth at their venues—for example, at retail stores, restaurants and bars. Hence, their limited feature set becomes their strength, because their photo booth software is easy to set up and operate. However, if you’re looking for a more robust set of features and customization options, the other options on this list will serve you better.
Foto Master
Like Darkroom Booth, Foto Master is one of the oldest players in the photo booth market, and they offer both hardware and software solutions.
For their photo booth software, they have different editions for iPad and Windows. They offer a huge range of features, such as augmented reality, hair color replacement and even interactive games like tic-tac-toe. Some of these features are only offered by Foto Master, so if you have a unique requirement, they might be the only option that supports it.
Learning how to use their software can take time and feel overwhelming, but there’s a good chance that this is the only photo booth software you will need to support all of your events. However, if you’re looking for a solution that is easy to learn and set up, there are better options on this list.
Foto Master sells their software with a lifetime license, which means you’ll just have to make a one-time investment.
Social Booth
Social Booth (by Photo Booth Solutions) is a Windows-based software with support for Canon DSLRs and webcams. Its pricing is based on a license which includes one year of updates and installation on two separate PCs. After a year, you can purchase updates at a discounted price.
Social Booth offers a fairly wide range of features. It can support standard photo booths, GIF booths, video booths and mirror booths. You can customize the user interface and create custom templates for the photos and prints.
It offers a couple of unique features, the first of which is a “video host”. Essentially, you can record a video which you can play on the screen to cue your guests. For example, the video can show a photographer providing posing instructions, before automatically triggering a countdown. The second unique feature is the karaoke photo booth, which lets you record lip sync videos.
SparkBooth
SparkBooth offers photo booth software that can be run on Windows and Mac, and it’s compatible with Canon and Nikon DSLR cameras. Compared to the other options on this list, it has a relatively limited feature set, but that’s offset with its comparatively low price—it offers a lifetime license at a lower price point than the other options.
With SparkBooth, you can take still photos or GIFs, sign and draw on the photos or apply digital stickers, instantly share the photos via email, add custom borders and create print templates. In short, it has all of the features you need to provide a basic photo booth experience.
It’s a good option if you’re just starting off or only planning to provide the standard photo booth. For example, if you’re a photographer and you’re looking to add on a photo booth service, this could be a good option to explore.
