In 2015, Emma and I got married. It was, by every reasonable measure, a brilliant day. We laughed, cried, drank what historians may one day classify as an indecent quantity of espresso martinis, and danced badly with people we love.

We have, perhaps, fifty photos of it.

Not five hundred. Fifty.

This is not a tragedy on any meaningful scale. We know what our friends look like, we remember the day fondly, the marriage is going swimmingly, thank you for asking. But every wedding anniversary, when we sit down to look back, we feel the weight of the photos that should exist and don't. Or that exist somewhere, in the murky depths of someone's iCloud, four phones ago, behind a password no one remembers.

That feeling is why we built alby.

The photographer left before the party

Here's the bit that still makes us laugh, mostly.

Our wedding photographer (lovely, talented, professional), had to leave unexpectedly before the evening. Family emergency. The kind of thing you don't argue with. They captured the ceremony, the speeches, the cake. They did not capture the 'fun parts'.

The dancefloor, as anyone who has ever been to a wedding knows, is where the actual wedding happens.

We have memories of my mates with ties around their heads rocking it (whilst the band had a break), our dads bonding over new (for them) drink discoveries, our grandmothers dancing to our first dance, and the flower girl asleep under a chair with Eton Mess all over her face..

But. no. photos.

Where wedding guest photos actually go

Here's what we now know, having researched this for an embarrassing number of hours: at any modern wedding, your guests collectively take thousands of photos. Thousands. Every phone is a camera. Every camera is a phone. People are documenting like they're being paid by the megapixel.

And then, after the wedding, almost none of those photos ever reach the couple. Back of envelope maths told us 84% never made it to the couple.

Why?

• WhatsApp groups die. Someone posts four photos, three people heart-react, and then the group becomes about Love Island by Tuesday. Anything older scrolls into the void.

• WhatsApp compresses. The handful of photos that do get shared come through at a resolution that would embarrass a 2007 BlackBerry.

• People mean to send them. They really do. They'll get round to it. They will absolutely send those photos as soon as they finish unpacking, or get back from holiday, or remember at 2am which is too late to send anything.

• Lurkers exist. Most guests will never post anything publicly. Their best photos are on their camera roll, where you'll never see them, until their phone dies and the photos go with it.

So you're left with the official photographer's set, a Dropbox link from your auntie that expired after three days, and a vague sense that there must be more out there somewhere.

There is. There's always more out there. You'll just never see it.

What we wish had existed in 2015

If you'd given us, in 2015, a single QR code on every table that anyone could scan to add their photos, videos and messages to one shared, well-lit, full-resolution album, we would have wept. We would have put it in the vows.

There would have been one place. One link. Every guest's photos. Every video. Every awkwardly-filmed first dance from six different angles. The reading no one captured properly because the official photographer was changing lenses. The dancefloor we lost to that family emergency.

That technology didn't exist then. Not really. There were a few clunky options involving hashtags and printing physical prompts and praying. None of them worked the way you'd actually want them to work.

So we built one.

What alby is, in plain English

alby is a QR-code-based photo and video sharing platform for weddings and events. You print one code (or a few — we won't gatekeep), put it on tables, in the order of service, on the bar, even in the toilets, wherever you'd like guests to find it. Guests scan it, add their photos and videos directly to your album, and that's it. No app to download. No account to create. No compression.

Your wedding photographer can even easily add their photos to it.

So you end up with a single, shared, full-quality album of your wedding day — including all the bits the official photographer didn't, couldn't, or wasn't there for.

We built it because we wanted it. We're a decade too late for our own wedding, but if you're reading this and you haven't got married yet: please. Don't make our mistake. Don't lose the dancefloor.

Frequently asked questions about wedding photo sharing

How do you collect photos from wedding guests? The traditional answer is "WhatsApp groups, hashtags, and hope". The modern answer is a shared QR code that anyone can scan to add their photos directly to one album. With alby, guests don't need to download anything or create an account — they just scan, upload, and the photos and/or videos arrive at full resolution.

Why don't WhatsApp groups work for wedding photo sharing? Three reasons. First, WhatsApp aggressively compresses images and videos, so you lose quality you can't get back. Second, group chats become noisy and old photos scroll out of reach within days. Third, most guests are lurkers — they'll watch the group but never actively post their own photos to it.

Do wedding guests need to download an app to share photos? No. Guests scan a QR code with their phone camera, which opens a web page where they upload photos and videos directly. No app, no account, no faff. This is the single biggest reason guest photo apps fail, anything that asks people to install software at a wedding is asking too much.

Are photos saved at full resolution? Yes. Photos and videos uploaded via alby are stored at the resolution they were taken in. No silent compression, no "we'll downsize this for you, you're welcome", no surprises a year later when you try to print one.

Is alby just for weddings? Weddings are where this hurts most for us, which is why we started there. But the same problem exists for any event where lots of people are taking photos and the host will never see most of them; birthdays, christenings, reunions, hen weekends, family holidays, funerals. The mechanism is the same.

When should you set up wedding photo sharing? A few weeks before the wedding is ideal. You'll want time to print your QR codes onto signs, table cards, the order of service, or wherever feels right. Setting it up early also means guests can add photos taken in the run-up; hen do, stag do, getting-ready morning, the rehearsal dinner, so the album becomes the whole story, not just the day itself.

What happens to the photos after the wedding? They stay yours. The album doesn't expire the way a Dropbox link does, and you can keep adding to it for as long as people are still finding photos at the back of their camera rolls — which, in our experience, is roughly forever.

If you take one thing from this: the photographer cannot be in two places at once, and they sometimes have to leave. Your guests are the rest of the photographer. You just have to give them somewhere to put the photos.

We wish someone had told us in 2015. Consider yourself told.