By Eventiere
Festivals break every assumption that photo sharing is built on. There is no guest list, no badges, no email addresses, and a crowd that turns over between sets.
What there is instead is volume. Tens of thousands of frames across several days and multiple stages, and an audience that will never see almost any of them.
Why festivals are the hardest case
At a conference you know who attended. At a festival you often do not, and the people in your photographs are strangers who will never be on a list.
That rules out the usual delivery methods. There is no one to email, no registration record to match against, and no realistic prospect of anyone browsing 40,000 photos to find themselves.
- Attendance is anonymous, so delivery cannot depend on knowing who someone is.
- The crowd changes through the day, so photos and people are not neatly paired.
- Volume is an order of magnitude above a corporate event.
| Corporate event | Festival | |
|---|---|---|
| Do you know who attended | Yes, from registration | Usually not |
| Photo volume | Hundreds to a few thousand | Tens of thousands |
| How people are reached | Email, badge, delegate list | Signage and screens on site |
| Identifier that works | Email or face | Face |
| Gallery structure | One event gallery | Per stage and per day |
A selfie is the only identifier that works
Face matching solves the identification problem without needing anyone's details. A festival goer takes a selfie and gets their photos, having never given a name or an email address.
That is a better fit for festivals than any list based approach, because it works for people who bought a ticket through a reseller, came with a friend, or turned up on the day.
No account, no app, no ticket lookup. The only thing a festival goer has to have with them is their face.
Getting the QR code in front of a moving crowd
The distribution only works if people know it exists, and a festival crowd is not reading signage carefully.
The placements that work are the ones where people are already stationary and already looking at a screen or a wall.
- Screens between sets, when the crowd is waiting and looking at the stage.
- Bar and food queues, where people stand still for several minutes.
- Exit routes, which catch people at the point they start posting about the day.
- The wristband or map, if there is a printed item everyone carries.
Multi day and multi stage events
Festivals rarely have one gallery. Stages, days and sponsor areas all produce their own sets, and the useful structure mirrors that.
Albums per stage or per day let a visitor browse the parts they were at, while face matching cuts across all of them. Someone who was at three stages over two days gets one personal gallery containing all of it.
Photos that should not be public
Artist areas, backstage and sponsor activations usually have different rules to the main arena, and those rules are often contractual.
A secret album keeps that material off the public gallery entirely while still letting the people who should have it get in with a code. Its photos also stay out of face search, so a festival goer cannot stumble into backstage photographs through a selfie.
Frequently asked questions
Does this work without a ticket list?
How many photos can one event hold?
What about people who do not want to be found?
Can sponsors get their own photos?
Try it with your own event photos
The free plan covers 3 events and 300 photos, with AI face search included and no credit card.