There are many wedding 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, because they are busy interacting with you and the other guests, or they feel like it’s a hassle. You also need to think about technical support. While the process can seem simple, not everyone is tech savvy—especially people who didn’t grow up with smartphones.
- We believe it’s more important for your guests to be present in the moment, than to record your wedding. After all, you’re inviting them because they are important people in your lives, not because of their photo taking skills.
- Most importantly, you’ve already hired someone to do this very job for you—your wedding photographer! 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 wedding photo sharing apps do. Instead of getting photos from your guests, you should be giving them the photos from your wedding photographer, in real-time.
- You provide an amazing experience for your guests, because everyone loves beautiful, professionally taken photos of themselves. It’s a meaningful reminder of your wedding, to commemorate the special time they spent with you. In addition, you’re sharing the photos when guests are the most excited, which is during the wedding itself—not days or weeks after the wedding.
- You create excitement and raise the energy by showing the photos in a live slideshow, which you can display on a large screen or multiple screens around the venue.
Instead of asking your guests to contribute photos, this approach lets you share photos to your guests. It’s the best gift you can give to them, to show them your appreciation.
As wedding 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 wedding is still happening.
In this article, we’ll explain how Honcho helps you create an extraordinary wedding experience for everyone. Or you can sign up for an account and see for yourself.
Upload Your Wedding Photos in Real-Time, From Camera to Cloud
Instead of collecting photos from your guests, Honcho lets your wedding photographer instantly share their beautiful and professionally taken photos. After all, everyone is most excited to see the photos during the wedding, not the usual days or weeks after it’s over.
Honcho does this by helping wedding photographers upload their photos from camera to cloud, while they shoot. The uploaded photos can be viewed instantly in an online gallery, which you can share with your guests.
Your wedding photographer just has to tether their 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 wedding photographer to cover the whole venue, whether it’s large or small.
You and your guests want to see the wedding photos right away, in the moment. After all, we’re living in the age of smartphones, where we can instantly share photos and videos. There’s no reason for wedding photography to be stuck in a different age.
Honcho lets your wedding photographer instantly share their photos in two ways—via QR code or face recognition.
QR Code
Right after your wedding photographer takes a photo, it will show up in the Honcho mobile 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 wedding 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 your wedding, 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.
All you have to do is share the link to the online gallery, and this can be done before the wedding. Alternatively, many of our clients print a QR code for the online gallery and place it around the venue, or show it on the main screen.
You might be concerned about sharing all of your wedding photos publicly, since they capture some of the most intimate moments of your lives. 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 you and selected guests can access it.
However, we believe that this approach has severe limitations, because it doesn’t let you share the wedding photos with all of your guests.
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 your wedding 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 a Live Slideshow for Your Wedding Photos
We’ve done thousands of weddings, and we know that nothing engages an audience more than a live slideshow.
There’s something magical about seeing photos of yourself on a large screen. It generates energy 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 wedding.
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.
You can show it on the main venue screen or even on multiple screens around the venue.
Your wedding photographer can control the photos that show up in the slideshow, by publishing or unpublishing them in the Honcho mobile app. That’s important for most photographers, because not every photo is worthy of being shown.
And while they shoot, the photos will go from the camera to the slideshow in real-time, without any manual file transfers—it just works automatically.
Conclusion
There are so many missed opportunities in the way that wedding photography is done today.
By not sharing the wedding photos right away, you miss the opportunity to create engagement and excitement during your wedding, to elevate it above any other event.
By not distributing the wedding photos individually to each guest, you miss the opportunity to give keepsakes that are personally meaningful to everyone. The photos are important to your guests too, but that’s too often an afterthought.
With Honcho, wedding photography becomes more than just documenting your life event. It adds to the experience of your wedding.
It’s a win-win for both you and your wedding 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 wedding photographer to sign up for an account with Honcho, and make a difference to your wedding.
