Frequently asked questions

Never. Guests scan your QR card or tap a link and land on one friendly page right in their phone's browser. They can take or upload photos in three taps — no app, no account, nothing to install.

About a minute. Pop in your names, pick a colour you love, and we instantly create a QR card and shareable link you can print or post anywhere.

Yes. Opening the gallery and uploading photos or videos needs Wi-Fi or mobile data. If reception at the venue is patchy, guests can take photos with their usual camera app and upload them later using the same link or QR code, while your gallery’s upload window is still open.

Yes. Set your event date, choose your plan, and get your gallery and QR cards ready ahead of time. Your upload and storage periods are measured from the event date you set, not the day you purchase, so buying early doesn’t use up your time for collecting and keeping photos.

Absolutely. Create a Free gallery without a credit card and try it with your own photos. You can upgrade the same gallery later and pay only the difference between plans, keeping your photos, link, and printed QR codes. An upgrade extends the upload and storage periods from your original event date; it doesn’t restart the clock.

No subscription, and guests never pay. Pro and Expert are a one-time payment for one gallery, with no monthly charge or automatic renewal. Separate galleries each need their own plan.

Yes, guests can add photos and videos on every plan. Free includes 100 uploads, Pro includes 500, and Expert has unlimited uploads. Each photo or video counts as one upload, and every plan allows unlimited guests. If you reach your upload limit, existing photos and videos stay in the gallery, but new uploads stop until you upgrade.

Not a penny. Collaborators are included on every plan, even Free, with no limit on how many people you invite. It’s the same lovely feature whether you’re on Free or Expert.

Yes — with the Expert plan, turn on upload review in your gallery settings before guests start uploading. Each new photo or video stays hidden from the shared gallery and Live Photo Wall until you or a collaborator approves it. The gallery link can already be live so guests can upload; you decide which uploads appear. With review off, uploads appear automatically.

You do, always. Pro and Expert include a ZIP download of all stored photos and videos, so you can keep a copy after the event. Download them before your gallery’s storage period ends; bulk downloads aren’t included on Free.

Absolutely. Invite your partner, a friend, or family to be collaborators — by email or a single shareable link. They can sort, tidy up, and download right alongside you, so it never all lands on one person. You stay the owner and decide who’s in.

Any single photo, yes — remove it and the file is erased from our storage, rather than just disappearing from the page. Guests can do the same with their own uploads without asking you, which is usually the one that matters at 2am. A whole gallery you can delete from your dashboard at any time: the link stops working immediately, and the files are wiped a month later, on the same clock as an expired gallery.

Yes. Once a Pro or Expert album is paid for, its owner can choose a custom public slug in the dashboard and change it up to five times. It must be an available name between 3 and 64 characters, using letters, numbers and single hyphens; spaces are turned into hyphens for you. The same custom slug works in both your full PhotoCheese album URL and your chz.is short link.

Yes. Every previous slug stays attached to your album. An old PhotoCheese album URL or chz.is short link permanently redirects straight to the newest address, so invitations, messages and QR cards you already printed keep reaching the gallery. Your dashboard updates the share link and QR code to use the latest slug for anything you make next.

No. The public slug is only the guest-facing part of the album link. Changing it does not rename the gallery, change its private dashboard address or Photo Wall link, or move any photos in storage. Those stay fixed while the public link and its QR code update.

Anyone you give the link or QR code to — and, as far as we can tell, only them. There’s no sign-in for guests, so the link is the key: whoever holds it can open the gallery, and we genuinely can’t tell one guest apart from another. Your gallery isn’t listed anywhere on our site and isn’t on Google.

If they have the link, yes — we’d rather say that plainly than imply a guest list we don’t have. The link that opens your gallery is the same one that adds to it. In practice the link lives on the cards on your tables, so this is mostly a question of where you put those. You can turn uploads off entirely at any point, and the Expert package lets you approve every photo before it shows up.

Two clocks run. First uploads close — after 2 days on Free, 30 on Pro, 90 on Expert — so late additions don’t trickle in months later. Then the gallery itself reaches the end of its window: a week on Free, three months on Pro, a year on Expert. We email you 15 days, 7 days, and 1 day before that happens. The gallery then comes off the web, and a month later the files themselves are wiped — that gap is deliberate, so a gallery you didn’t mean to lose can still be brought back.

No. We don’t train AI on them, don’t sell them, don’t advertise against them, and don’t use them as examples on this site. There isn’t a single feature in PhotoCheese that looks at the contents of your photos. They’re stored so your gallery can show them, and that’s the whole list.

No. Every gallery page tells search engines not to index it, and we block the whole gallery path in our robots file as a second layer. Chat apps like WhatsApp and iMessage can still draw a little preview card when someone shares the link — that’s a preview being fetched, not a page being indexed. What we can’t control is someone re-sharing your link somewhere public.