Four years of friends, one gallery.
Everyone in that hall is about to move to a different city. The photos from today are spread across three hundred phones belonging to people who are, by design, about to lose touch — so collect them now, while everyone is still here.
Everyone photographs it. Then everyone leaves.
A graduation is unusual among big days: the group it belongs to dissolves the same week. A wedding’s guests still see each other. A year group does not. Whatever is not collected in the fortnight around the ceremony is, in practice, collected never.
And the photos really are everywhere. Parents nine rows back, friends on the lawn, grandparents who travelled, staff who took a lovely one and have no idea who to send it to. The official photographer covers the stage and charges per print, which leaves the entire rest of the day — the bit everyone actually wants — distributed across hundreds of phones with no route between them.
So a graduation needs the collecting to happen while everyone is still in the same postcode, in one tap, with nothing to install.
What usually happens
- An official photographer, charging per print
- A group chat that dies in September
- A hashtag nobody checked after the day
- Everyone meaning to swap numbers, later
The walk across
Four seconds, from about nine rows back, taken by a parent who has been holding their phone up for forty minutes waiting for it. Every family in the hall has a version of somebody else’s child crossing that stage.
The cap toss
Genuinely the only unposed thing that happens all day, and it happens once, for two seconds, with a hundred caps in the air. Whoever got the good one got it by accident and does not know they have it.
Family photos, in shifts
Grandparents who travelled, the sibling who took a day off, the gown that does not fit anyone. Each family photographs its own group, and nobody gets the one of them all together because someone was always holding the phone.
The last night everyone is in the same city
This is the real one. Four years of people who are about to scatter to different countries, in a pub, for the last time — and there is no list of anybody’s numbers to send the photos to afterwards.
One graduate, or three hundred.
These are not the same purchase, so we have not pretended they are. The mechanism is identical; the plan, the scale and the questions you will be asked are not.
For a family
A graduation is one of the few days that reliably gets three generations into the same place, most of them having travelled, all of them taking photographs of the same person. And every one of those photos ends up somewhere different: your mother’s phone, your aunt’s phone, your brother’s phone, the friend from halls whose surname nobody is certain of.
The specific loss is the relatives. Somebody’s grandfather takes a lovely photo on the lawn, shows it to two people, and it stays on his phone for the rest of its life because he is not in any group chat and never will be. Nobody is going to fix that by asking him to install something.
One card at the lunch afterwards catches all of it. Pro is the right plan here — 500 uploads is more than a family will ever produce, the files come back at full quality, and three months is plenty of time to get everything downloaded and printed before anybody forgets it exists.
Pro, $49 once. 500 uploads, full-quality originals, three months of gallery and a month-long upload window — so photos from the evening, and the ones your aunt finds on her phone a fortnight later, all still land.
For a class, year group or school
At institution scale the problem inverts. It is not that photos are scarce — there are thousands of them — it is that they are distributed across three hundred people who are, by design, about to stop seeing each other. There is no group chat that contains the year, and after September there is no realistic way to assemble one.
One gallery and one code fixes it before they leave. Put the code on the programme, on the holding slide behind the stage, and on the tables at the reception. Parents upload from their seats, students upload from the lawn, and staff upload the photos they took that nobody asked for. Everything lands in one place while everyone is still in the same postcode.
Expert is the plan for this, and not as an upsell: it is the only one with unlimited uploads, the only one with the approval queue a school needs, and the only one that keeps the gallery for a year — which is the number that counts when people download in their own time from four different countries.
Read the under-18 answer in the FAQ below in full. There are no guest accounts, so a gallery cannot be restricted to your domain or to a pupil roll, and we will not pretend otherwise. The approval queue, real deletion and a one-switch takedown are the controls that genuinely exist.
In time for the programme going to print.
About a minute. If you’re a university, do it in time for the code to go into the programme artwork — the gallery accepts uploads from the moment it exists, so there is no reason to wait.
The programme is the one piece of paper every person in the hall is holding, so that is the place. Add table cards at the lunch and a slide on the screen at the reception.
Expert keeps the gallery for a year, which is what matters when everyone scatters. People download it in their own time, from wherever they have moved to.
Set it up before the programmes are printed.
The gallery accepts uploads from the minute it exists, so there is no reason to leave this until the week of. Free costs nothing if you want to see it working first.
On the programme, which everyone is holding.
Every gallery comes with its own code. The programme is the one piece of paper in every hand in the hall, so that is where it goes — plus table cards at the lunch and a slide on the screen at the reception. Guests point a camera at it and upload seconds later.
This one is real: point your phone at it and you’ll land in our live demo gallery.
your photos
Before you put a code on three hundred programmes, go and see what a guest actually gets. There is no signup wall in front of our demo gallery — it is the real product, which is worth checking against whatever else is on your shortlist.Open a real gallery
your photos
A live slideshow at the reception.
Cast the gallery to a screen at the reception and the day plays itself back while people are still holding their first drink. It fills the wall, it tells the room the gallery exists, and on Expert nothing appears until a member of staff has approved it.
Parents, staff, or whoever is on the queue.
For a family, this is the graduate and whichever relative is good at admin. For a school, it is however many staff are sharing the approval queue. Either way, everyone works from their own phone and nobody is the single point of failure.
Where graduation photos actually go.
If you are a family, you are about to ask relatives to upload to a domain they have never seen. If you are a school, you are about to be asked much harder questions than that. Both deserve a straight answer rather than a badge, so here is ours — including the parts we cannot promise.
There is no guest sign-in, which is what lets four hundred people in a hall use it at once. It also means we cannot restrict a gallery to your institution’s domain or to a class list, and we cannot verify that a viewer attended. The link is the access control, and one switch removes the gallery from the web.
The link that opens the gallery is the link that uploads to it. On Expert, though, an upload is not a publication: manual pre-approval holds every photo in a queue only your staff can see until someone approves it.
Every gallery page asks search engines to skip it, and our robots file blocks the path outright. Galleries are not listed anywhere on our site. This matters more here than almost anywhere: photographs of students should not be findable by name, and they are not.
No facial recognition, no AI of any kind, no training, no selling, no advertising, and no use of customer photos as examples on this site. There is no feature anywhere in PhotoCheese that inspects the contents of an image.
Removing a photo deletes it from storage rather than hiding it from the page, and the same is true of a whole gallery. A student can also withdraw their own upload from the phone they sent it from, without going through staff.
Uploads close 90 days after the event date on Expert and 30 on Pro; the gallery then expires after a year or three months respectively, and the files are wiped a month later. We email 15, 7 and 1 days before the end so nobody loses anything by accident.
A link is a link, and for a school that is the sentence that matters. There are no gallery passwords today, no domain restriction and no attendee list, so a link shared into a large group chat reaches everyone in it and we cannot tell those people apart from the ones on your programme. If you are running this for under-18s, treat it exactly as you treat any photography at a school event: your existing photo-permission process, a named member of staff on the approval queue, the link shared deliberately rather than broadcast, and the gallery taken down once people have their copies.
Two things we would rather you heard from us than discovered. We cannot offer guaranteed EU data residency or a signed DPA today — if your policy requires either, we are not the right fit yet, and our full security position is written out on the security page. And photos arrive exactly as the phone took them, so one can still carry the location it was taken in; we are working on stripping that out.
— Marina & Ivan
Our full security position — encryption, infrastructure, access and the controls you hold — is on the security page, and it is the version to forward to whoever is asking.
We’re Marina and Ivan. We started PhotoCheese after a friend’s wedding, where the couple spent weeks chasing guests in a group chat for photos they’d already taken.
A graduation is the sharpest version of the same problem: a group of friends about to scatter, a day everybody photographed, and no group chat left by October to pool any of it into.
Two paths, depending on who you are.
A family wants Pro. A class, a year group or a school wants Expert — for unlimited uploads, the approval queue and a full year of gallery. We have highlighted both rather than pretending there is one answer.
For trying it at a small lunch.
For one graduate and their family.
For a class, year group or school.
Comparing event photo apps before you decide? See our current, source-linked GuestPix and Kululu comparison.
Not sure yet? Look around a real gallery firstEvent further off? We’ll nudge you nearer the time.
Tell us the date and we’ll remind you a week before, with your QR card ready to print. No account, no setup today.
Graduation questions, answered.
Yes, and that is what Expert is for. One gallery, one QR code, unlimited uploads and unlimited guests — put the code on the programme, on the screen behind the stage and on the tables at the reception, and three hundred students all add to the same place. Expert also gives you the approval queue and keeps the gallery for a year, which matters when the people who want to download it are scattering to different cities the following week.
Celebration still months away? Leave your date and we’ll remind you a week before.
PhotoCheese is made by Marina and Ivan, two people who answer their own support email. If you are buying this for an institution rather than a family, the corporate events page has the invoicing, data and moderation answers set out in full. If the graduation is really a twenty-first with gowns on, start there instead. And every other kind of celebration is one click away. Anything we haven’t answered, ask us — a real person replies.
In a month, nobody will be in the same city.
Set up the gallery in about a minute. Free to start, $49 one-time — or $99 for a whole year group.