Your guests took the other photographs,
and you have a fortnight to collect them.

Your photographer stands where you are paying them to stand: the aisle, the top table, the light. From there they get the frames you will print. What they cannot get is the third row during the vows, where your mother is doing something with her face that will never happen again. They are not at the bar at half past midnight, or in the room where four people were getting ready and nobody was working. Those pictures exist. They are on phones.

They are also the pictures most likely to vanish. Nobody deletes them on purpose. A camera roll fills up, a phone is replaced, and the wedding scrolls past the holiday and the new kitchen until the day you ask, three months later, and get a completely sincere "I'll have a look" that never turns into anything. The window in which a guest can find a photograph of your wedding in ten seconds is roughly a fortnight long.

So the task is not persuading people to take pictures. Ninety people with phones will do that unprompted. It is giving them one obvious place to put them, and asking while they can still be bothered.

Every route has a real cost. A group chat is where people already are, which is its whole appeal, and it compresses everything that passes through it: you get a small, soft copy of a photograph you might otherwise have printed. It also scrolls, so two weeks later you are saving three hundred images by hand out of a thread that also contains a debate about parking.

A shared cloud folder keeps full quality and loses people at the door: the ones without an account have to make one, the ones on the wrong platform have to install something, and somebody always ends up in the permissions loop where the link opens and the upload does not. A hashtag needs everyone on the same social network. Airdrop and its equivalents work only in the room, on the night, between two phones held next to each other.

The route with nothing to set up is the link guests already have. They have opened the event page to reply, again for the directions, and once more to check what to wear. In Vowly that same page carries a photo gallery guests upload to, and it opens from a link or a QR code, so there is nothing to install and nowhere new to sign in. The guide to the wedding guest information page lists what else belongs there.

The honest test for any option is the number of steps between "I have the photograph" and "you have the photograph". Two is achievable. Five is a wish.

There are three moments, and most couples use only the middle one. The first is before the day. A line on the guest page saying that photographs are welcome and where they go sets an expectation, and it catches the getting-ready pictures your bridesmaids take at nine in the morning, which otherwise never reach anyone.

The second is on the day, and it wants to be an object rather than an announcement. A small card on each table with the QR code and one plain sentence — photographs from tonight go here — beats anything said into a microphone, because people read a card at their own pace and act on it while they are sitting down. If you do want it said aloud, put it in the running order rather than leaving it to whoever holds the microphone; the order of the day guide covers where such a line sits without stalling the evening. After dinner, before the dancing, is the natural gap.

The third moment is the one that actually collects photographs: the morning after. Send a short message before lunchtime, while the wedding is at the top of everyone's camera roll and half your guest list is sitting in a hotel breakfast with nothing to do. One line, the link, no apology for asking. Then nudge once more a week later, specifically for video — people do not think of a clip of the speeches as a photograph, and will never send it unless you name it.

The case for is easy to picture. An aisle lined with raised phones appears in every photograph you paid for. Someone leans out for a better angle and puts an arm through the professional's frame at the exact moment you turn around. The person filming is watching a screen rather than the two of you, and so is everyone behind them. In some places the officiant will make the request for you if you ask in advance.

The case against is not sentimental. Those raised phones are producing exactly the pictures nobody else is taking, and an unplugged ceremony deletes that set before it exists. It also asks people to behave differently from how they behave everywhere else in their lives, and it is only as good as its enforcement, which is to say your uncle will do it anyway. A grandparent who could not travel may be watching through somebody's phone.

The compromise most couples land on splits the day rather than the guest list. Phones down from the moment the doors close to the moment you walk back out, and phones entirely welcome from then on. Say it twice, once on the page and once out loud before you begin, and say why rather than what. "We would love to see your faces" is a request people honour. "No photography" is a rule people test.

A photograph of your wedding is also a photograph of thirty other people who did not agree to publish anything. Two settings sound identical and are not: anyone with the link, and anyone at all. A gallery opened from a link or a QR code reaches the people you handed the link to. A public post is on the open internet, indexed and copyable, and no longer yours to withdraw. Know which you have before the first upload.

Then tell guests, in one sentence, where their photographs will end up: who can open the gallery, whether anything will be published more widely, and how to ask for a picture to come down. Put it where they upload, not in a paragraph nobody reads. People are relaxed about this when they have been told, and quite reasonably not relaxed at all when they find out later.

Children need an explicit answer rather than an assumption. Ask the parents, and take a no without asking why — some families have reasons they will not explain, and they are usually good ones. Older children have their own opinion and are entitled to it. The rule that works: guests' children appear in the gallery those guests can see, and go no further without a parent saying yes. That includes the picture you were about to put on a public profile because it is the best one of the day.

What you may do with the professional set is in your contract, and the clause is worth reading before the wedding rather than during the argument after it. The common arrangement gives you personal use — print them, hang them, share them with your people — while the photographer keeps the copyright and asks for a credit wherever a picture appears publicly. Anything commercial is a separate conversation. Guests reposting a picture with no credit is where this usually goes wrong, and one line in your thank-you message prevents most of it.

Size is a decision, not a default. Put web-sized versions in the gallery: they open quickly on a phone on a train, they look right on a screen, and they are not the files anyone should print from. Keep the full-resolution set yourself and send it to the few people who genuinely want to print something, usually both sets of parents and two friends. The people who need nine hundred enormous files will ask you for them.

How long is two questions. Photographers commonly hand over a download link that expires, sometimes after a few weeks, so take everything down on the day it arrives and let no deadline you did not set decide what you keep. Your own gallery is a different matter: most guests will look once, soon after you send the link, and there is no harm in leaving it up for a year as long as you are still happy with who can reach it.

The difference in quality is real and worth being honest about. The professional set is lit, exposed, edited and consistent — it is a set, with a shape to it. A phone photograph from the third row is grainy in the candlelight, slightly crooked, with half of somebody's head in the corner, and it holds a moment that matters more than any of that. Judging the second by the standards of the first is how the best pictures of your wedding get deleted.

Both belong in the same place, because nobody will remember which link held which set, and a year from now the one you want will be in the other one. They do not belong in the same album. Mixing hundreds of edited frames with hundreds of phone snaps ruins both: the professional set loses its rhythm and the guest pictures get buried. Two sections on one page, clearly labelled, solves it.

Do not forget video. Speeches from four angles, the first dance filmed from the back of the room, half a minute of your grandfather laughing at something off camera. These are often the files people are most glad to have later, and nobody sends them unless you ask by name.

Within the first month, while every link is alive and everyone still cares, download the lot — your photographer's set and the guests' set — and keep it somewhere that is not a single app. One copy on a drive you physically own and one copy elsewhere is enough. A gallery is a good place to look at photographs and a poor place to be the only copy of them: services change their terms, and the year you need the files is the year you have stopped thinking about any of this.

Then send the thank-you, and let it carry the gallery link. It is the most-opened message you will send after the wedding, which makes it your last and best chance to collect the stragglers. Something this plain does the job: thank you for being there, here are the photographs, ours and yours, and if you still have any on your phone, this is where they go.

The page then stops being an invitation and becomes a record. The notes people left in the guest book sit alongside the pictures, which is the argument for a digital guest book living on the same page as the gallery rather than in a book in a drawer, and the planning app that held your checklist and your guest list holds all of it afterwards. Print something as well. Screens are how you will look at these this year; an album is how they survive the decade.