Comparison
Google Photos for your wedding guest photos
A shared Google Photos album costs nothing and collects photos from your guests perfectly well. Before you pay anyone — including us — here is the honest version of what it does, where it falls over at a wedding, and how to tell which one you actually need.
The short answer
One fact decides it. Anyone can view a shared Google Photos album from a link, but adding a photo to it requires being signed in to a Google account. If your guests mostly have Google accounts and you don't mind being the help desk for the ones who don't, use Google Photos and keep your $59. If "sign in to continue" between a guest and the shot they just took sounds like a problem, that gap is the entire reason this product exists.
What Google Photos does well
- It's free, and it stays free. There is no event, no expiry and nothing to renew.
- You already trust it. The photos sit beside the rest of your life, in an account you'll still have in ten years.
- Guests who are already set up find it easy. For someone with the app installed and signed in, contributing is genuinely two taps.
- No cap we impose. Your limit is your own Google storage, not a number someone sold you.
If that describes your wedding, stop reading and go make the album. We'd rather you kept the money than bought something you didn't need.
Where it falls over at a wedding
Not because it's bad software — because a wedding is a room of 130 people, half of whom are over sixty, holding a drink, in the dark, who will each try this exactly once.
- The sign-in wall is where guests quit. A guest scans, gets asked to sign in to a Google account, doesn't remember the password, and puts the phone back in their pocket. That photo is gone, and you never find out it existed.
- It asks the wrong people to be technical. The guests most likely to take the photos nobody else is taking — your aunts, your grandparents — are the ones most likely to get stuck.
- The link gets lost in the group chat. A shared album lives at a URL somebody has to keep finding, which is a different job from pointing a phone at a card on the table.
- You become the support desk at your own reception. Every couple who has done this describes the same evening: explaining the album instead of dancing.
Side by side
| Feature | Cricky Creations | Google Photos |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $59 once, per event | Free |
| Guest needs an account to add photos | No — the QR opens a camera | Yes — a signed-in Google account |
| Guest needs to install anything | No | Usually the Google Photos app |
| Viewing the album | Host only — guests never browse | Anyone with the link can view |
| How many photos | 1,000 included, top-ups available | Bounded by your 15 GB Google storage |
| Bad reception at the venue | Queues on the phone, retries until it lands | Depends on the app's own sync |
| Who does tech support on the day | Nobody — there's one button | You, at your own wedding |
| How long it's kept | 1 year, then the gallery comes down | As long as you keep the account |
So which one
Use Google Photos if…
- Your guest list skews younger and already lives on Google.
- You want the photos kept forever, in an account you control.
- You're happy to chase people afterwards for the shots they forgot to upload.
- Free matters more than effortless.
Use us if…
- You want every guest shooting within seconds of scanning, with nothing to sign in to.
- Your older relatives are the ones taking the candids you care about most.
- You want the album private — guests add photos, they never browse them.
- You'd rather spend $59 than spend the reception doing tech support.
Where we're worse
Three of them, and you should know before you pay rather than after.
- We cost $59. Google Photos costs nothing. That's a real difference and no feature list makes it disappear.
- Your gallery comes down after 1 year. We tell you before it does, and you can download everything as a ZIP at any point — but this is a way to collect your photos, not a place to keep them forever.
- The pass covers 1,000 photos. Enough for a typical wedding, and you can add more — but it is a ceiling, and Google's isn't.
Plenty of couples use both: the QR cards on the tables for the night, and their own Google Photos album for the album that lasts. Nothing stops you downloading everything and putting it there.
Be the guest before you pay
The demo camera is the real thing. Open it, take a few shots, and see how many taps it takes — then decide whether that's worth $59 to you.
No sign-up. Or set up an event free — 10 photos to test it properly.