Wedding photo sharing with unlimited guests

Unlimited guests means the number of people who upload is neither a limit nor a price bracket: everyone at the wedding scans the same code, and the couple pays the same one-time fee whether the list runs to 40 people or 400.

Unlimited guests is claimed widely enough in this category that the phrase on its own narrows the field very little. What a buyer can check is where the guest number still does something, and it does that in one of three ways: a price bracket set by head count, a free option that ends at a guest number, or a storage allowance that a bigger wedding fills faster. Below is Wedding Arrivals beside every service whose own pricing attaches a number to one of the three.

The middle column is the one to read first. For Keeps, POV and PartyCam the head count is the pricing mechanism itself, so a shortlist priced at 25 guests is a different shortlist at 200. For PicStashio and Gathmo it is not the guests that run out but the storage tier they fill. And for the three services that deposit into a Google Drive the couple already owns, the ceiling belongs to the couple rather than to the provider — 15 GB on Google's free tier, shared with everything else in that account.

Wedding Arrivals is $49, $89 or $119 one-time and the figure is the same at 40 guests or 400. It is not the cheapest way in: Keeps stays under $49 at every one of its brackets, at the cost of publishing no storage window anywhere on its site and stating nothing about guest video or a live slideshow — so the cheaper number buys an album with an unstated life. What the $49 buys is a price that does not move and a plan with every feature on it.

• One code for everyone. Every guest at a Wedding Arrivals event scans the same printed QR code and uploads from the phone browser, so the setup for 400 guests is the setup for 40 — nothing to install, nothing to sign into, no seat to assign.
• Photos land in the Wedding Arrivals album as they arrive. An upload that fails never takes down the ones that already got through, and a guest only re-sends what failed.
• A dropped signal retries by itself. Venue Wi-Fi buckles when a room full of phones uses it at once, and a Wedding Arrivals upload picks itself back up.
• Each sub-album gets its own code. Rehearsal, ceremony and reception can each be printed with their own QR code, so a big night arrives pre-sorted instead of in one pile — up to six sub-albums on the $49 Wedding Arrivals plan, unlimited on the $89.
• You approve what appears. Wedding Arrivals moderation decides what reaches the album and the reception slideshow, which counts for more the more people are uploading to it.
• Unlimited photos and videos, not only unlimited guests. Every paid Wedding Arrivals plan takes photos and video from every guest and hands back the exact file the phone sent, at original resolution with no compression.

We read every price and every published bracket off the provider's own pricing or help pages and recorded them as written, in the provider's own currency. Where a provider attaches a guest number to a price or a free option, that number is in the table above as the provider prints it. Services whose pricing attaches no number to the guest count sit inside the full field instead.

The full 50-service field, with every price checked against its provider, is in the comparison of 50 wedding photo sharing apps.