Why Google Drive and Google Photos Aren't the Best Way to Collect Event Photos
It's free, everyone's heard of it, and you already have an account. Making a shared album for your wedding or your dad's sixtieth feels like the obvious move, and for a while it is.
Then you send the link to sixty people and watch what happens. A dozen photos arrive. Your cousin texts to ask why it wants her to sign in. Someone on an iPhone says the link "just shows the photos" and they can't work out how to add theirs. Your mum, who took the best photo of the night, never gets past the login screen.
Nothing is broken. Google is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It just wasn't designed for this.
Here's what actually goes wrong, what Google is genuinely good at, and how to do it properly if you'd still rather stick with it.
First, when Google is the right answer
Let's be fair about this, because plenty of posts on this subject aren't.
If you're collecting photos from a handful of people who all already use Google, a shared album is great. Family holiday with your brother and his wife. A weekend away with four friends. A group who've been sharing an album for years already. It's free, the quality holds up, and there's nothing to learn.
The trouble starts when the group gets bigger than the people you'd text individually, and when you can't assume everyone's already inside Google's walls. Which is to say: a wedding, a christening, a big birthday, a company party.
Problem one: guests need a Google account
This is the big one, and it's the one nobody mentions until it's happening to you.
Anyone can view a shared album from a link. To add photos to it, they need to sign in with a Google account. Same story on Drive: uploading a file into your folder means being signed in.
That sounds minor if you're reading this on a laptop with Gmail open in another tab. At an event it isn't. A meaningful chunk of your guests are on iPhones and live in iCloud. Some have a Google account but haven't signed in on their phone for years and have no idea what the password is. Some deliberately avoid Google. And the ones who'll give up fastest are the older guests — who are, reliably, the ones holding the photos you'd most want.
You don't hear about this failure. Nobody texts you to say "I tried to add my photos and gave up." They just don't appear.
Problem two: the 15 gigabytes are already spoken for
Google gives you 15GB free, and it's shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos together. Google Photos stopped offering free unlimited uploads back in 2021, so everything now lands in the same bucket.
Whatever's left of that after years of email is what your event has to fit into. Modern phones shoot big — a few seconds of 4K video eats more than you'd think, and guests film a lot at weddings. If it fills up mid-event, uploads simply start failing, and your guests won't tell you that either.
You can pay for more storage, and it isn't expensive. But now you're on a monthly subscription in order to hold onto your wedding photos, for as long as you want to keep them.
Problem three: the caps that are hard to pin down
Shared albums have limits on how many items they hold and how many people can contribute. You'll find confident numbers for both in blog posts across the internet, including from companies selling alternatives.
We're not going to repeat those numbers, because we couldn't verify them in Google's own documentation, and they've changed before. What matters is the shape of it: the limits exist, they're not designed around a hundred and fifty people uploading in one evening, and they can change without anyone announcing it. If you're going the Google route for a large event, check Google's current help pages yourself rather than trusting any of us.
Problem four: Drive's permission problem
Google Drive has a specific version of this that catches people out.
For someone to put a file into your Drive folder, you have to give them edit access. Edit access doesn't just mean "can add." It means they can see everything else in that folder and, if they're careless, move or delete it. There's no native "drop a file in here and that's all you can do" setting.
Which is why a small industry of third-party upload tools exists solely to bolt that feature onto Drive.
Problem five: the Google Forms workaround that isn't
The usual clever suggestion is to make a Google Form with a file upload question, so guests never touch your Drive directly.
It's a reasonable idea, and it does keep your folder tidy. But Google requires people to sign in to a Google account to upload a file through a Form. So the workaround for the account problem still has the account problem. It's moved, not solved.
Worth knowing before you build the form and print the link on forty table cards.
Problem six: the small things you notice afterwards
A few more, each individually minor:
There's no password on a shared album link, and no way to make it expire. Once it's out, it's out, indefinitely.
Guests can't easily pull back their own photo. Someone will want to — there's always one — and it becomes your job.
There's no live slideshow. If you fancied guest photos appearing on a screen at the venue during the evening, Google isn't going to do it.
And the album is organised the way Google organises things, not the way you'd want to look back on an evening.
What to use instead
For anything bigger than a family group, the thing that works is a link that needs no account at all. Guests point a phone camera at a QR code on the table, a page opens in the browser, they pick their photos, done. Nobody signs into anything.
We build one of these — PhotoCheese — so weigh our opinion accordingly. There are several good ones. Whichever you look at, the questions worth asking are the same:
Can guests upload with no app and no account?
Do photos arrive at full quality?
Can you download the lot in one go?
How long does it stay up, and what happens at the end?
That last one applies to everybody, us included. Every one of these services expires; the windows just differ.
If you want the fuller picture, we compared every method for collecting photos from wedding guests — hashtags, disposables, shared albums, the lot — in a separate post. And if it's specifically a wedding you're planning, there's a whole page on wedding photo sharing with the practical side of it.
If you're sticking with Google, do it properly
Genuinely reasonable choice, particularly if the group is small or the budget is nil. Some things that will noticeably improve your odds:
Say the account thing out loud, in advance. Put it on the invitation or the wedding website: guests will need a Google account to add photos. Half your problem is people discovering this at the venue with a drink in hand.
Use Photos rather than Drive for a general "everyone add your pictures" album. The permission model is less dangerous and the interface is friendlier on a phone.
Check your storage before the day, not after. If you're anywhere near the 15GB, buy a month of extra storage for the event and cancel it once you've downloaded everything.
Test any QR code you print with a different phone before running off a stack of them. We wrote up the practical side of QR codes for photos — sizes, placement, what goes wrong — and that advice holds regardless of which service sits behind the code. If you need to make the sign itself, our QR sign maker is free and works with any link, Google's included.
Download everything within a month. Get the full-resolution originals onto a drive you own. This is the step people postpone and then regret, and it's the one piece of advice in this post that applies no matter what you use.
Assign a nominated helper. Someone who isn't you, who can talk a confused guest through signing in. On the day, you will not be available for tech support.
None of this is Google being bad at its job. Shared albums are built for people who are already inside Google, sharing with other people already inside Google, and at that they work well.
A party is a different problem. It's fifty phones belonging to fifty people with fifty different setups, most of whom will try once and give up if anything asks them a question. Whatever you use, the only thing that really matters is that it demands nothing from them beyond pointing a camera at a square.
Curious what the no-account version looks like from a guest's side? Have a poke around a real gallery — no signup, nothing to install.