You've been here before.

Close friend’s wedding. All your besties were there. 700 photos taken across fifteen phones. By Wednesday, eleven of those photos have made it into the WhatsApp group, and by Thursday the chat has moved onto summer plans.

Meanwhile the couple have to wait six weeks for the professional shots to come through. 

alby is the bit between "the photos exist" and "you actually have them".

What alby is, defined properly

alby is a photo, video, and message sharing platform for events, groups, and families. You create an event, and album, share a QR code or link, and anyone you invite can add their photos and videos to it. No app to download. No account to set up. No compression. Everything sits in one place, at full resolution, for as long as you want it to.

It works for:

• Weddings. Where this all started for us. (Long story, told properly here.)

• Families. Holidays, reunions, birthdays, milestone anniversaries, the slightly chaotic Christmas where four cousins all got engaged.

• Events. Conferences, parties, christenings, charity runs, that thing your colleague invited you to and you weren't sure whether to bring a gift.

• Standing groups. The five-a-side team. The book club. The WhatsApp group that's technically called "Sicily 2019" but has been running for six years.

If a group of people are taking photos of the same thing and you want those photos in one place, alby is the thing for that.

Why we built it, briefly

We got married a decade ago. The photographer left early. The dancefloor was undocumented. Our guests took hundreds of photos and we have, perhaps, eighteen of them. The full story is over here if you want it, but the short version is this: we wanted one shared, full-quality album, and the technology to make that easy did not exist yet.

It does now, because we built it. Better late than never.

Why every other option falls short

We have tried them all. Some of them more than once. Here’s what happens.

WhatsApp groups. The default for most people, and the worst option of the lot. WhatsApp compresses photos to roughly the resolution of a fax machine, drains the colour out of videos, and the chat itself gets noisier with every forwarded meme until your photos have scrolled into the abyss. Three months later you cannot find the picture of your nephew's birthday cake. It is not deleted. It is just gone.

iCloud shared albums. Genuinely useful if everyone in your group has an iPhone. Statistically, they don't. Half your guests are on Android, and they get a noticeably worse experience. There are also upload limits that Apple is not loud about.

Google Photos shared albums. Better than iCloud for mixed-device groups, but still requires every person to have a Google account, sign in, and remember they are contributing. The friction is small but real, and at scale "small but real" means most people simply do not bother.

Dropbox or WeTransfer. Brilliant for sending a finished folder of photos somewhere. Awful for collecting them. Links expire. Folders get unwieldy. Nobody wants to upload to a Dropbox at a wedding.

Facebook events. If it is still 2014 where you live, this is a workable option. Otherwise, no.

Doing nothing. The most popular choice, by a distance. The result is the photo situation you currently have, which is presumably why you are reading this.

The pattern across all of these is the same: they were built for something else, and using them to collect group photos is a bit like using a screwdriver to butter toast. Possible. Not advisable.

The AI editing bit, which is properly fun

Here is where things get interesting, and where we get to feel slightly smug about having built this in 2026 rather than 2015.

When you have hundreds, or thousands, of photos in an album, the album itself becomes the problem. Nobody has time to scroll through 1,400 photos from a four-day family reunion. The album becomes a graveyard of memories: technically saved, practically inaccessible.

This is where alby's AI features earn their keep.

• Find every photo of someone in seconds. Looking for every shot of grandad? One tap. The album does the rest.

• Tidy up the awkward bits. Remove the stranger photobombing your sunset shot. Soften the harsh hotel-corridor lighting. Fix the group photo where one person blinked (it’s always the same person).

• Caption and organise. The album writes its own chapter headings, so the day-three beach photos do not get lost between the day-two pub photos.

We are careful with this stuff. AI on photos is fun when it makes the album more useful, and creepy when it pretends to be magic. We have leaned hard into the first thing and steered clear of the second.

(The AI features sit on our paid plans, alongside higher capacity and longer archives. The free version of alby still does the core job: collect everyone's photos in one place, at full resolution, without anyone needing to download a thing.)

Frequently asked questions

What is alby? alby is a photo and video sharing platform for events, groups, and families. People scan a QR code or follow a link, add their photos and videos to a shared album, and that is it. No app to download, no account to create, no compression on the way in.

Who is alby for? Anyone organising or attending an event or group activity where multiple people are taking photos. Weddings, birthdays, family holidays, reunions, conferences, sports teams, book clubs, school trips. If three or more people are taking photos of the same thing, alby helps.

How is alby different from WhatsApp or iCloud? WhatsApp compresses photos heavily and buries them under chat noise within days. iCloud shared albums require everyone to have an Apple device, which most groups do not. alby is built specifically for collecting photos from a group, regardless of phone or operating system, without anyone needing to install an app or sign up.

Do guests need to download an app to use alby? No. Guests scan a QR code or open a link, and they upload straight from their phone's browser. The friction-free upload is the entire point. Anything that asks people to install software at an event is asking too much.

Are photos stored at full resolution? Yes. Photos and videos are kept at the resolution they were uploaded in. No silent compression, no surprise downscaling, no "we'll fix that for you" without asking.

Does alby use AI? On paid plans, yes. AI features include searching for specific people across an album, cleaning up photos (removing photobombers, fixing lighting, smoothing blinks), and auto-organising photos by moment or day. Free plans do not include AI features but still cover the core job of collecting and sharing photos.

Is alby just for weddings? No. Weddings are where the problem hurts most, and it is where we started, but alby works for any event or group: family holidays, christenings, birthdays, reunions, hen weekends, work events, sports teams, school trips. Any time a group of people are taking photos of the same thing.

Is alby private? Yes. Albums are private to the people you invite, and you control who can see and contribute. We do not make albums public unless you ask us to.

How much does alby cost? We have a free tier and two paid tiers (Classic and Max) for albums that need higher capacity, longer archives, or the AI features. You can see the pricing here.