A Wedding Gallery Where Guests Find Their Photos With a Selfie

The whole interaction is four steps, and it happens on a phone at a kitchen table three days after the wedding.

1. The guest opens the gallery link the couple sent, and enters the gallery password if the couple set one.
2. They tap the button that offers to find their photos. The panel that opens explains what the feature does with the selfie, before they give one.
3. They take a selfie with the phone's front camera. The photo is read by their own browser, on their own device. It is not uploaded, not stored, and not seen by you, by the couple, or by us.
4. The grid filters to the photos they appear in. The comparison that produces that filter also runs in their browser. They can then download the ones they want, the same way any other visitor can.

What sits on the server is not a record of the guest. It is a set of numeric face descriptors attached to the gallery's own photos, computed in your browser when you uploaded them. Those descriptors are gated by the gallery password, and they are deleted when the photo or the gallery is deleted.

Two honest limits, because a wedding gallery is a big public-ish audience and you should know them before you promote the feature. There is no separate guest-facing control that says "delete my face data", because there is no guest face data held to delete. And switching face search off for a gallery stops the feature for visitors, but it is not by itself a purge of descriptors already computed for that gallery's photos. Deleting the photos or the gallery is what removes them.

Face search is off by default and is turned on per gallery. There is no account-wide setting that quietly enables it everywhere, which matters when your work is not all weddings. A boudoir gallery, a family shoot for a client who asked for discretion, or a corporate job under an internal policy simply never gets the switch flipped.

For a wedding, the sequence is: upload the gallery, turn face search on, set a password if the couple want one, and send the couple the link with one line telling guests the button exists. That last part is the step photographers skip. A guest who does not know the button is there scrolls for half an hour anyway.

A line in your delivery email is enough. Something like: open the gallery, tap "find my photos", take a selfie, and only your photos will show. Your selfie stays on your phone. See the photo delivery guide for the rest of the handoff.

This is the one detail that will trip you up, and it is specific to how wedding galleries get built.

Face search is gated by the gallery password on the server, along with the gallery page itself, the whole-gallery ZIP, the full-resolution ZIP and comments. That part is straightforward. The catch is where the feature lives.

One limit to state before you promise a couple more than the password gives. Individual proof image URLs are public and do not expire. The password stops the gallery page from disclosing those URLs, but it does not protect an image URL that somebody already holds and forwards.

Most wedding photographers split the day into sections: getting ready, ceremony, portraits, cocktail, reception, dance floor. A gallery holds sections, exactly one level deep, and you can create them by dragging one folder in per section. But a section link is view-only. It carries no ZIP, no full-resolution handoff, no picks, no comments and no face search.

Face search works on the parent gallery link only. If you send the couple six section links because it felt tidier, no guest will ever see the button. Send the parent gallery link. The sections are still there inside it, and the password covers all of them, because a section link resolves to its parent.

One password, one link, sent to the couple to forward. That is the configuration that works.

Two effects, and they point in the same direction.

Guests who find themselves share your work. A guest who scrolls for thirty minutes posts nothing. A guest whose selfie surfaces the eleven photos she is in downloads three and puts them up that evening. Every one of those is your photography in front of an audience that was physically at a wedding you shot, which is the exact audience that books weddings. You cannot buy that placement, and it only happens if finding the photo is easy.

The couple stop being your support desk. The forwarded request, "can you find the one of my aunt at the head table", is a small task that arrives twenty times over six weeks. It costs the couple goodwill to keep asking and it costs you an afternoon in total. Face search deletes that queue. The guest answers their own question.

Neither of these is a headline feature the couple asks for at the booking meeting. Both are things they remember afterwards, which is where wedding referrals come from.

Face search is usually sold as a reason to move up a pricing tier. Pic-Time lists selfie search under Smart Search on its Advanced plan, described as "People search, keyword search, selfie search", with face recognition explained as "Visitors can click on a face to find all related images". Advanced is listed at $50 a month billed monthly, or $42 a month billed annually.

clientgallery.io has one plan, and face search is in it.

Both figures are from the vendors' own pricing pages, fetched 8 September 2026, and listed in Sources at the end.

On privacy the comparison is not one-sided, and it is worth stating properly. Pic-Time publishes a privacy policy that documents its biometric handling in detail, including a photographer opt-in consent step. We do not have an equivalent written consent flow. What a guest gets here is the explanation they read before they give a selfie, and the fact that the selfie never leaves their device. Both models are laid out side by side in face recognition gallery privacy.

A wedding is the largest gallery most photographers deliver, so the ceilings are worth saying plainly rather than hiding behind the word unlimited.

If a gallery goes over a thousand photos, the upload is refused and you are told to start another gallery. Galleries are unlimited, so a big wedding becomes two links, each with face search on. The practical version: split by half-day, or split the ceremony and portraits from the reception, and give the couple both links.

Uploaded photos are compressed in your browser into proof JPEGs sized for fast viewing, and they are hosted for as long as the account exists. Full-resolution delivery is separate: you upload a full-resolution ZIP per gallery, it stays live for three days per handoff, and you can re-upload it any time. The hosted gallery does not expire. The ZIP does. Keep that distinction in mind when you write the couple's delivery email.

clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video. That is what keeps the price flat.

Face matching is not perfect and no honest page will tell you otherwise. Weddings produce exactly the conditions that break it.

• Heavy shade. A guest photographed under a tent or in a dark church may not be matched.
• Extreme angles. Profiles, three-quarter turns away from the camera, and faces tipped down are weaker matches than a straight-on frame.
• Motion blur. Dance-floor frames are the most likely part of a wedding gallery to be missed.
• Sunglasses. An outdoor summer ceremony can hide half the guest list.
• False positives. A guest may be shown a photo that is not them. Siblings and family resemblance make this more likely at a wedding than anywhere else.

So set the expectation in the sentence you write to guests. Face search is a filter that gets them most of the way, not a guarantee that every frame they appear in will surface. The full gallery is still there to browse, and a guest who thinks a photo is missing should scroll the relevant section.

Face search is one feature. It is not a reason to move a studio that is working.

If your couples buy prints and albums through your gallery, and print sales are real revenue rather than an idea, stay where you are. clientgallery.io has no print store, no album designer and no commission structure, because it deliberately does one job. Pic-Time is built for studios whose business runs through the store, and a photographer whose couples expect a print shop and album design inside the same tool is better served staying there.

Move here if what you actually need is a fast, unbranded gallery with guest face search included at a flat price, and your print sales happen elsewhere or not at all. That is a real segment of wedding photography, and it is the one this is built for. See the best client gallery for wedding photographers for the wider comparison.

• Pic-Time pricing, plan tiers and Smart Search feature listing. https://www.pic-time.com/pricing, fetched 8 September 2026.
• Pic-Time privacy policy, biometric handling and photographer opt-in consent. https://www.pic-time.com/privacypolicy, fetched 8 September 2026.