Wedding photo sharing app that keeps full resolution files

"Full resolution" means the file you download is byte-for-byte the file the guest's phone uploaded — same pixel dimensions, same compression, nothing re-encoded in between. A service that hands back a "high quality" or "HD" copy has resized or re-compressed it, and the original is gone.

On a phone screen, a resized copy and the original look identical. The difference only shows up in the two places wedding photos actually end up: a print, and a crop. A modern phone shoots a 12-megapixel photo at 4032 × 3024 pixels; the common resize targets are 2048 or 1600 pixels on the long edge. Divide the pixels by 300 dpi — the standard for photo printing — and the gap is easy to see.

So a cap at 2048 pixels does not ruin your photos — it quietly limits you to about a 7 × 5 print, and takes the album spread, the framed enlargement and any meaningful crop off the table. It also compounds: you cannot un-resize a file later, and by the time you notice, the guest has usually cleared their camera roll.

Video behaves the same way and matters more, because it is where the file sizes are. A service that re-encodes guest clips to save storage hands you something visibly softer than what was filmed, and the same one-way rule applies.

These cells are read off each provider's own pricing or help pages. "Not stated" means the provider publishes no answer at all, and a service that will not put it in writing is a different risk from one that answers it badly. The other 31 of the 50, including Guestpix, GuestCam, PicStashio, LensGo, Wedibox and Eventoly, do state that you get original quality back; the full field is in the 50-service comparison.

Two patterns are worth naming. The first is the adjective: "full quality", "high quality" and "HD" are marketing words with no fixed meaning, and none of them is a commitment to hand back the original file. The second is silence — ten of these nineteen simply do not publish the answer, which is the cell you can do least about after the wedding.

• The file is stored as uploaded. What lands in your Wedding Arrivals album is the file the guest's phone sent — same pixels, same compression, no resize step and no re-encode. Video comes back the same way, not as a smaller re-encode.
• You download the whole album in one go. One ZIP of the original files from your dashboard — not several hundred photos saved one at a time, and not a smaller "web-friendly" export.
• Original-resolution downloads and the album ZIP are on every plan, including the $49 one. Wedding Arrivals does not put the full-quality download a tier up. Its plans differ on how long the windows run, the number of sub-albums, priority support and how many events you get — never on features.
• Guests upload in the browser. They scan a printed QR code, pick photos and video, and upload — no app to install, no account to create, nothing to sign into.
• You decide who gets the original files. In Wedding Arrivals the full-resolution originals and the whole-album ZIP are the couple's; a guest browsing the shared gallery saves at viewing size. So nobody walks off with the full set of your wedding photos — and when you do want someone to have the real file of a shot they are in, you send it.

Wedding Arrivals runs both clocks from your wedding day, not from the day you pay — so you can book up to two years ahead without burning the window before a single guest has uploaded. On the $49 plan guests can keep uploading for 3 months and the album lives 12; on the $89 plan they upload for 12 months and the album lives 24, per event. Only 6 of the 50 services we checked anchor storage to the event at all, and fewer anchor the upload window there too. Then take the last step yourself: because what you get back is the real file, pulling the ZIP onto your own drive makes the photos permanently yours — whichever service you end up using.

We read the resolution and pricing claims off each provider's own pricing, features or help pages and recorded them as written. Where a provider states original quality, we say so; where it uses an adjective like "full quality" or "HD" without committing to the original file, we quote the adjective; where it publishes nothing, the cell says "not stated". Prices are the provider's own list prices in their own currency, not converted.

The print sizes above are arithmetic, not a lab test: pixel dimensions divided by 300 dpi. The full 50-service field, including every service that does state original quality, is in the comparison of 50 wedding photo sharing apps.