Which phones, browsers, and countries work

What do guests need, and which browsers work?

A phone from the last several years, the browser it already came with, and a signal. That’s the whole list. There’s no app in any store, no sign-up, and no password, so a guest who never installs anything can still send you photos 20 seconds after they scan the code.

Safari on iPhone, Chrome on Android, and Firefox or Edge on a laptop all run the guest page the same way. Nothing turns a browser away by name or by version number — the page checks only whether the browser can decode the photo that was picked, and whether the microphone was allowed for a voice note.

You need an account, because you own the album. Your guests never do — the QR code itself carries the token that lets them upload to your event, and nothing else.

1. Scan or tap the link. The camera app reads the code. A link pasted into a group chat lands on the same page.
2. Pick from the camera roll. The picker opens with photos and videos, and a whole batch can be selected at once.
3. Record a voice note. That runs on its own screen with its own microphone prompt. Declining it leaves uploads untouched.

Laptops and tablets

Both work as well as a phone, with the same formats and the same limits. For a guest who already copied a camera card onto a desktop, send the link instead of asking them to scan a code off a screen.

What happens to a photo before it’s sent?

It gets rebuilt on the phone. The page decodes the picture, scales the long edge down to 2560 pixels, and re-encodes it as WebP — as JPEG where WebP isn’t available, and a PNG stays a PNG. A 6 MB camera file lands well under 1 MB, which is the difference between arriving and stalling on venue Wi-Fi.

The re-encode also drops everything the camera wrote around the picture: GPS coordinates, the camera serial number, timestamps, XMP and IPTC. That happens on the guest’s phone, before a single byte leaves it. Rotation is baked into the pixels on the way through, so nothing arrives sideways.

Videos and voice notes are not touched. They go up exactly as the phone recorded them.

Do HEIC photos from an iPhone work?

Yes, on the iPhone itself. Safari decodes HEIC, so the conversion finishes on the phone and what reaches your album is an ordinary web image. HEIC is also accepted as a declared format by the upload path itself, alongside JPEG, PNG, and WebP.

The case that fails is a HEIC opened somewhere else: copied onto a computer, then picked in a browser that can’t read the format. Nothing is uploaded then, on purpose, and the page offers the fix — screenshot the photo and send the screenshot.

Can guests upload from iCloud or Google Photos?

Through the phone’s own picker, yes. There is no server-to-server import: nothing signs in to an iCloud or Google account, and your album only ever receives the files a guest picks and sends. The browser gets whatever the operating system hands it, which is why opening the photo once in the Photos app is worth doing on a thin connection.

Picking the same file twice costs nothing. Uploads are matched by content, so a file the event already holds is recognized and skipped instead of being stored again.

Why is the voice recorder silent?

Because the microphone permission was declined, or another app is holding the microphone. The recorder is the only part of the page that asks for anything, and the prompt appears the moment a guest taps to record. Declining it breaks nothing else: photo and video upload keep working, and the message stays inside the voice panel.

A blocked permission comes back in the browser’s settings for that site, not in the page. A live video call is the other blocker worth naming. End the call, tap record again.

Which countries can use it?

All of them. There is no country list anywhere in the product, nothing checks where a guest is standing, and no upload is refused for arriving from the wrong place. Country decides exactly 1 thing, and that is the currency you are charged in at checkout.

Language and currency are separate. Reading the site in English from Madrid still bills in EUR, because the country decides and the language does not.

What if the Wi-Fi drops mid-upload?

The upload picks up where it stopped. A long video goes up in parts, and the parts that already landed stay in place, so tapping the failed tile resumes at the missing part rather than at byte 0. A whole failed batch retries in one go instead of being picked file by file again.

Venue Wi-Fi is where an evening goes wrong, not the browser. A room of phones sending at once reaches the limit of a guest network long before it reaches ours, and mobile data is the steadier choice in a full room.