How it all works

You choose your names, the web address you want, and whether you need Essential or Premium. You pay once, securely through Stripe, and your gallery exists straight away. There is nothing to install and nothing to set up afterwards before you can start uploading.

The names you enter become the name of your gallery. Guests see them in the header, on your home page and on the sign-in screen, so put them the way you would like to be introduced. You can change this later in Settings.

1. Go to the Create Your Gallery page.
2. Enter your names, your email address and the web address you want.
3. Choose Essential or Premium.
4. Pay with a card. Your gallery opens as soon as the payment goes through.

Every gallery gets its own address, in the form yournames.newlywedsgallery.com. It is yours alone, it is what you give to guests, and it is what they see in the browser while they are looking at your photos.

Pick something short and easy to say out loud, because you will end up reading it to people. The address is chosen at signup and cannot be changed afterwards, so it is worth a moment's thought.

The two plans differ only in how many photos they hold. Essential takes 250 photos from you and 250 from your guests. Premium takes 2,000 from each. Every other feature is identical: the same curation tools, the same colour themes, the same guest uploads, the same analytics.

The counts are separate, so guest uploads never eat into your own allowance. If you are unsure, think about how many photos your photographer will send you rather than how many you took on the day.

Everything you need is in Settings, under Share Your Gallery. There is a link to your gallery, an access code, and a QR code you can print or put on a screen.

Guests need both the link and the code. The code is what keeps your photos private: anyone who finds the address without it cannot get in. Put both on your order of service, a table card, or a message to the group.

1. Open Settings from the menu.
2. Scroll to Share Your Gallery.
3. Copy the gallery link and the access code, or save the QR code.
4. Send them to your guests however suits you.

A guest opens your gallery link and enters their name, their email address and the access code you gave them. They get a sign-in link by email, and clicking it puts them in the gallery.

There is no app to download and no password to invent. The name they enter is the name that appears next to anything they like or comment on, so it is worth asking people to use the name you would recognise them by.

Guests can look through every photo in the gallery, upload their own from their phones, like photos, leave comments, and save the ones they love into a private collection of their own. They can also download a photo they want to keep.

Guests cannot delete your photos, change your Highlights, alter your settings, or see your billing. The curation is yours alone.

The Upload page takes photos straight from your computer or phone. You can select a whole folder at once and leave it running. If you navigate away mid-upload the upload keeps going, and a small panel keeps you posted on how far along it is.

If you upload the same file twice it is skipped rather than duplicated, so re-running a folder after adding a few new pictures is safe.

Any photo can be removed, whether you uploaded it or a guest did. There is a bin icon on the photo, both on the grid and in the full-screen view.

Removing a photo takes it out of the gallery for everyone, including anyone who had saved it. It is not reversible, so it is worth a second look before you confirm.

Highlights is the reel your guests land on first. It is not everything you uploaded, it is what you want seen. Star a photo anywhere in the gallery to add it.

On the Highlights tab you can drag photos into the order you want, make individual photos larger or smaller so the layout has some rhythm, and apply a filter. You can also reposition how a photo is cropped, which matters for tall photos in a wide space.

1. Star the photos you want, from any tab.
2. Open the Highlights tab.
3. Drag them into the order you want.
4. Use the size and filter controls under each photo, and the move icon on the photo to change its crop.

One photo sits at the top of your home page, and it is the first thing a guest sees. Choose it from the Highlights tab using Select Home Photo, then click a photo.

Because the home page shows it in a different shape from the grid, it has its own crop. The house icon on that photo lets you set how it is positioned there without changing how it looks anywhere else.

All four live in Settings under Your Gallery. The names appear in the header and on the sign-in page. The date and venue appear on your home page. The welcome message is yours to write and sits under your home photo.

Leave the date or venue blank and they simply do not appear. Nothing here is permanent, so you can change any of it whenever you like.

There are seven colour palettes, and the whole gallery follows whichever you choose: buttons, headings, badges and accents. Guests see the change immediately, with nothing to refresh.

The theme is in Settings, under Theme. You can change it as often as you like, including after guests have started using the gallery.

Anyone signed in can like a photo and leave a comment on it. Both are visible to everyone in the gallery, with the name the person signed in under.

Saving is different: everyone's saved collection is private to them. Your Saved tab holds your own, not a shared list, and a guest's Saved tab holds theirs.

The Analytics page shows six numbers: photos uploaded in total, how many came from you, how many came from guests, how many guests have joined, total likes and total comments.

It is a summary, not a record of who did what. It is there to tell you whether people are actually using the gallery, which is usually the thing you want to know a week after the wedding.

You pay once when you create your gallery. Essential is £9.95 and Premium is £19.95. That is a one-off payment, not a subscription, and it includes three months of storage from the day you pay.

Nothing is taken automatically after that. If you want the gallery to stay online beyond the three months, extending storage is a separate choice you make yourself.

When the three months are up the gallery stops being reachable and everyone, including you, sees a page explaining that it has expired. Extending storage from that page brings it back.

Download anything you want to keep locally before then, so nothing depends on the gallery staying up. Every photo can be saved from the full-screen view.

Sign-in links are single use and do not last indefinitely. If one has already been clicked, or has been sitting in an inbox for a while, requesting a fresh one from the sign-in page will fix it.

If the email has not arrived at all, the spam folder is the usual culprit. Check the address was typed correctly too, since the link goes wherever it was sent.

Almost always the access code. It has to match exactly, and it is easy to mistype or to have an old one from a message sent before the code was seen properly.

Send them the code again from Settings under Share Your Gallery, and check they are opening your gallery's own address rather than the main Newlyweds Gallery site.

Nothing fails quietly. The upload screen lists every photo that did not go through, with the reason beside it, and the rest of the batch carries on regardless. There are only a few reasons, and most are fixable in a moment.

“That photo is too large.” Each photo has to be under 25MB. Photos taken on a phone are almost never near that. The usual culprit is a camera RAW file, or a full-quality export from editing software. Saving it as a JPEG will take it well under the limit.

“That file isn’t a photo Newlyweds Gallery can display.” We could not read the file as an image at all. Videos, PDFs, camera RAW files, and files that have been renamed to .jpg without actually being converted all land here.

“This gallery has reached its photo limit.” You have used up your plan’s allowance. Your own allowance and your guests’ are counted separately, so the message tells you which of the two is full.

Anything else is usually the connection. An upload that loses signal partway through is reported as a failure rather than left half done. Simply running the same folder again is safe: anything already in the gallery is skipped rather than added twice.

If a photo keeps failing and none of these fit, get in touch. Send us the file name and exactly what the screen said, and we will look at it for you.

A large upload finishes in the background, so photos can arrive a little after the upload panel says it is done. Reloading the page is usually enough.

If a photo is genuinely missing, check the Upload page: anything that failed is reported there rather than silently dropped. Duplicates are skipped on purpose, so a photo already in the gallery will not appear twice.

No. Everything runs in a normal web browser on a phone, tablet or computer. Guests follow a link or scan a QR code.

Yes. Guests need the access code as well as the link, and the gallery is not listed or searchable. Anyone without the code cannot get in.

Yes. Every photo in your gallery is yours to take down, whoever added it. It is your gallery and your call.

Further uploads are refused with a message saying the limit has been reached. Nothing already uploaded is affected. Your allowance and your guests' allowance are counted separately.

Not from inside the gallery today. Get in touch and we will sort it out.

No. The limits are on photos, not people. Invite everyone.

Yes. Any photo can be saved from the full-screen view, by you or by your guests. Do this for anything you want to keep before your storage period ends.

Your gallery is available the moment you pay, and you agree at checkout that we can start straight away. Doing that ends the fourteen day right to cancel that would otherwise apply, which is set out in our terms.

That does not affect your rights if something is faulty, not as described, or not provided with reasonable care. If something has gone wrong, get in touch and we will put it right or refund you.

Yes, and it is worth doing. Your three months start when you pay, so if you want the gallery live for a long time afterwards, bear that timing in mind.