Photos from the office party - without chasing them afterwards

The office party is the event where the most photos are taken and the fewest are shared. Everyone has a phone out, the photos end up in thirty separate camera rolls, and on Monday there is one thread in Slack or Teams where four people posted something and everyone else left a thumbs up.

It does not have to go that way. But a work event asks a couple of things a birthday party does not.

Set it up before the day, not on it

Create the event a few days ahead and open the gallery the day before. That sounds like a detail, but it is the difference between someone daring to go first.

An empty gallery always needs someone to break the ice. If there are already three photos from setting up the room, the next person uploads without thinking about it.

Where the QR code goes

At a seated dinner people stay put for most of the evening, and that changes the placement compared to a reception where everyone is standing:

• A table card at every seat. The important one. People scan what they can reach without getting up.
• One at the bar. Where people wait, there is time to scan.
• One at the entrance. It catches the ones who arrive late and missed the announcement.

Always write a line on the card saying what the code does. A bare QR code does not get scanned. "Scan to share your photos from tonight" is enough.

Pro tip: Say it out loud once, when everyone is seated. That one sentence from whoever welcomes people moves more than all the table cards put together.

Consent at work is not the same as at a private party

This is the part most guides skip, and the part that matters.

At a birthday party you can say no to being photographed. At work it is harder. Colleagues are in a dependent relationship, some have reasons for staying off photos that they would rather not explain, and a gallery from the office party can live on long after the evening.

Three things handle most of it:

Say it before the party. A line in the invitation or in the welcome: "We are collecting photos from tonight in a shared gallery. Let us know if you would rather not be in them." That gives people a way out without having to interrupt a party to ask for it.

Consider turning the shared gallery off. With eazy.photo you decide whether guests can see each other's photos or only their own. With the gallery off, people still upload to you - the photos just do not become an evening's viewing for the whole table. At a work event that is often the right setting.

Close it and download afterwards. An event closes automatically three months after its start date - the date follows the start and can be extended if you need it to. And you can always stop it early from your dashboard once the photos are in. Download them, put them wherever your workplace already shares files - Slack, Teams, SharePoint or your own drive - and close the event. Then there is no open gallery from last year's party that nobody remembers exists.

After the party

Download everything as a single file from your dashboard. If the photos come to more than 5 GB we pack them in the background and email you a link, so you do not have to stay on the page. The whole sequence - when the event closes, how long the photos stay and when they are deleted - is in the guide to the time after the party.

Post the link in the channel people already look at, rather than sending files around. Then there is one place to go when somebody asks whether any photos were taken at the office party. They will.