How it all works

You choose your names, your web address and a password, and your gallery is created straight away. There's nothing to install and nothing to pay.

Then we email you a link. Opening it confirms your address and signs you in for the first time. Until you do, the gallery is not usable — that link is how we know the address is really yours, and it is also how we can help you back in if you ever forget your password.

Your gallery starts private, so you can take your time setting it up. Guests you invite can add their own photos from the moment you share the link, but yours stay hidden until you press Publish.

The names you enter when you sign up are simply so we know who we're speaking to. They aren't shown to your guests. A new gallery starts with Your Names as its title, so one of the first things to do is personalise it in Settings, under Your Gallery. Your chosen name appears in the gallery header, on your home page and on the sign-in screen, so enter it exactly as you'd like your guests to see it.

1. Go to Create Your Gallery.
2. Enter your names, email address and chosen web address.
3. Choose your password. You'll use this to sign in from then on.
4. Open the link we email you. That confirms your address and signs you in.

Every gallery gets its own unique web address, such as yournames.newlywedsgallery.com. It belongs to your gallery alone and is the link you'll share with guests to view and add photos.

We recommend keeping it short, simple and easy to remember, especially if you'll be sharing it in person.

You'll choose your web address when you create your gallery, and it can't be changed afterwards, so it's worth taking a moment to pick one you're happy with.

Your gallery starts private. Your guests can sign in and add their own photos straight away, and they can see each other's, but your photos stay hidden until you publish.

That is deliberate. Guests usually get your link or QR code on the day itself, while the photos from your photographer are still weeks away. Without this, the first thing a guest would see is a gallery with almost nothing in it.

While your gallery is private you'll see a note at the top of it saying only you can see your photos, with a Publish button beside it. Your guests see your names, your home photo and your welcome message, and a short message on the Highlights and All Photos tabs saying the rest is coming.

Press Publish when you're ready and everything opens at once. If you need to take it back out of sight later, Hide From Guests is on the Account page, and your guests can carry on adding their own photos either way.

1. Upload your photos and arrange your Highlights.
2. Choose the photo for your home page.
3. Press Publish Gallery at the top of your gallery.
4. Your guests can now see everything.

Everything you need to invite guests is in Account, under Share Your Gallery. You'll find your gallery link, access code and a QR code you can save, print or display on a screen.

Your gallery link and QR code already include the access code, so guests using either can go straight through and simply enter their name. There's no need to send the access code separately.

The access code is useful when you're sharing your gallery address on its own, for example telling someone in person or printing it on a card. It also helps keep your gallery private: anyone who visits your web address without the code won't be able to enter, so only share it with people you want to have access.

1. Open Account from the menu.
2. Scroll to Share Your Gallery.
3. Copy your gallery link and access code, or save the QR code.
4. Share them with your guests however works best for you.

Guests simply open your gallery link and enter their name. That's it. The link and QR code already include your access code, so there's nothing else to enter and no email address required.

There's no app to download, no password to create and no email to confirm. The name a guest enters is shown alongside their likes and comments, so it's worth asking them to use a name you'll recognise.

If a guest comes back to the gallery on a different phone or computer, they can choose to enter their email address to pick up their saved photos again. This is completely optional and is never required to use your gallery.

Guests can browse every photo in your gallery, upload their own straight from their phone, like and comment on photos, and save their favourites to a private collection of their own. They can also download any photos they'd like to keep.

Until you publish your gallery, guests can add photos and see each other's, but not yours. See Publishing your gallery.

Guests stay in control of what they contribute. They can edit or delete their own comments and remove any photos they've uploaded themselves.

Your gallery itself remains completely under your control. Guests can't delete your photos, change your Highlights, alter your settings or access your billing. The gallery and how it's curated are yours alone.

The Upload page lets you add photos straight from your phone or computer. You can select multiple photos, or a whole folder, at once and leave them to upload in the background. You're free to move around your gallery while they're uploading, and a small progress panel will keep you updated.

Keep the tab open until the upload finishes. Moving around your gallery is fine, but closing the tab or reloading the page stops it. Anything already uploaded is safely in your gallery, and you can pick up where you left off by adding the same folder again — we'll skip whatever is already there.

You don't need to worry about accidentally uploading the same photo twice. If a photo is already in your gallery, we'll recognise it and skip it automatically, with a note to let you know it's already been added.

That means you can safely upload the same folder again after adding new photos. We'll add the new ones and skip anything that's already there.

You can remove any photo from your gallery, whether it was uploaded by you or by a guest. Just select the bin icon on the photo, either from the gallery grid or while viewing it full screen.

Removing a photo takes it out of the gallery for everyone, including anyone who has saved it to their own collection.

Deleting a photo is permanent and can't be undone, so we'll always ask you to confirm before it's removed.

If you've uploaded the wrong photos or simply want to begin again, you can clear them from the All Photos tab by selecting Need to start over? Guest Photos has a separate Need to remove these? option.

The two are kept separate deliberately. Starting over removes only the photos you uploaded, and anything added by your guests stays exactly where it is. Removing guest photos is a separate action, so you won't accidentally clear both.

Because this is permanent, we'll ask you to confirm twice and then type DELETE before anything is removed. The photos, along with their likes, comments and Highlights, can't be recovered afterwards.

If you've simply uploaded the same photos more than once, there's no need to start over. Head to Settings, under Tidy Up, instead, where you can remove duplicate copies while leaving everything else untouched.

If the same photo has ended up in your gallery more than once, you can easily tidy things up in Settings, under Tidy Up.

Select Check for Duplicates and we'll scan your gallery, tell you how many we've found and show you a few examples before anything is removed. If you choose to continue, we'll keep one copy of each photo and remove only the extras.

You won't lose the things that matter. If duplicate copies have different activity, we'll prioritise the one in your Highlights, or the one with the most likes and comments.

You shouldn't need to use this very often. We automatically recognise photos that have already been added and skip them during upload, whether they're being added by you or your guests. This means you can safely upload the same folder again without creating duplicates.

Highlights is the collection your guests see first when they open your gallery. Rather than showing everything you've uploaded, it's your chance to showcase the photos you most want them to see. Simply star a photo anywhere in your gallery to add it.

From the Highlights tab, you can arrange your photos exactly how you want them. Drag them into a new order, make individual photos larger or smaller to vary the layout, apply filters, and reposition the crop so each photo looks its best, particularly portrait photos displayed in wider spaces.

1. Star the photos you want to feature from anywhere in your gallery.
2. Open the Highlights tab.
3. Drag your photos into the order you want.
4. Use the size and filter controls beneath each photo to adjust its appearance.
5. Use the move icon on a photo to reposition its crop.

One photo takes pride of place at the top of your home page, making it the first thing guests see when they open your gallery.

The quickest way is from the home page itself. Choose Your Home Photo, or Change Photo if you already have one, lets you add a photo straight from your device. It is added to your gallery at the same time. If the one you want is already uploaded, the same panel links you to the picker on the Highlights tab.

Your home photo is shown in a taller shape than the photos in your gallery, so it has its own crop. Reposition, next to Change Photo, lets you drag it until it sits exactly how you want. Any change here only affects your home page, and the photo stays as it is everywhere else.

You can also do both from the Highlights tab, using Select Home Photo and the house icon on the photo you chose.

Every photo downloads at its full original resolution. You get back exactly the file that was uploaded, in the format it was uploaded in. Nothing is shrunk, and nothing is compressed a second time, so a photo from your photographer comes back as the file they gave you and a phone photo comes back exactly as your guest took it.

On screen you are shown smaller copies, because loading full camera files for a whole gallery would make it slow to open, particularly for guests on their phones. Photos in the grid are shown at up to 640 pixels along their longest side, and opening one full screen shows it at up to 2000 pixels. Both are made from your original the moment you upload, and both are sized to look sharp on a modern screen.

Those are limits rather than targets. A photo already smaller than them is shown at its own size rather than stretched to fit, so nothing is ever enlarged and made soft.

Your original is never altered and never replaced. It sits behind the versions you browse, and it is what you get whenever anyone downloads. That is why a photo can look good on screen and still print well.

Photos are downloaded one at a time, from the full-screen view. There is no single file containing the whole gallery, so if you are saving a lot, it is worth doing it in sittings rather than all at once.

Your guests can download too, exactly as you can. Anything in the gallery is available to anyone you have let in, at the same full resolution.

1. Open any photo so it fills the screen.
2. Choose Download.
3. The photo saves to your device at its original resolution.

You can personalise all four from Settings, under Your Gallery.

Your names appear in the gallery header and on the sign-in page, while your wedding date and venue are shown on your home page. Your welcome message sits just beneath your home photo and is yours to make as personal as you like.

The date and venue are optional, so if you leave either blank, it simply won't appear. And nothing here is permanent, so you can come back and change any of these details whenever you like.

Choose from seven colour themes to make your gallery feel more like your own. Your chosen theme is applied throughout the gallery, including buttons, headings, badges and other details.

You'll find your colour options in Settings, under Theme. Changes appear straight away for you and your guests, with nothing to refresh.

You can switch themes as often as you like, even after you've started sharing your gallery with guests.

Anyone signed in to your gallery can like a photo or leave a comment. Likes and comments are visible to everyone in the gallery, along with the name each person used when they signed in.

Saved photos are different. They're completely private. Your Saved tab contains only the photos you've chosen to save, while each guest has their own private collection that only they can see.

This means everyone can join in with likes and comments, while still keeping a personal collection of their favourite photos just for themselves.

The Analytics page gives you a simple overview of what's happening in your gallery. You can see how many photos have been uploaded in total, how many came from you and your guests, how many guests have joined, and the total number of likes and comments.

It's designed as a quick summary rather than a record of who did what, giving you an easy way to see how much your guests are using and engaging with your gallery.

Creating your gallery is completely free, with 3 months of storage included from the day you create it. There's no card to enter, no subscription and nothing to cancel.

Nothing is charged automatically when your 3 months comes to an end. If you'd like to keep your gallery online for longer, you can choose to extend your storage separately — and you can download everything at full size whenever you like, so what you keep is never tied to us.

Your gallery is stored for 3 months from the day you buy it, plus any additional time you choose to add.

When your storage period ends, your gallery will no longer be accessible. Anyone who visits it, including you, will see a page explaining that the gallery has expired. If you decide you'd like it back, you can extend your storage from that page and your gallery will become available again.

Your gallery is kept for 30 days after that. During those 30 days you can still extend your storage and get everything back. After that, the gallery and everything in it is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.

We recommend downloading any photos you'd like to keep before your storage period ends, so you're not relying on the gallery as your only copy. Every photo can be downloaded from its full-screen view.

If you no longer want your gallery, you can close it yourself from the bottom of the Account page. You'll be asked to type your gallery's web address to confirm, so it cannot happen by accident.

Closing your gallery takes it offline immediately for you and for everyone you shared it with. Your guests' photos are deleted along with your own, and they have no way to get them back, so it's worth downloading anything you or they want to keep first.

Nothing is deleted straight away. We keep everything for 30 days in case you change your mind, and you can restore your gallery yourself at any point during that time by signing in. After 30 days, everything is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.

Closing your gallery doesn't refund your purchase. If you're closing it because something has gone wrong, please get in touch first, as we may be able to help.

Guests don't normally need sign-in links. We only send them when you're confirming your email address, when someone wants to pick up their gallery activity on a different device, or when you need to reset a forgotten password.

For security, these links can only be used once and expire after a certain amount of time. If a link has already been opened or has been sitting in your inbox for a while, simply request a new one.

If the email hasn't arrived, check your spam or junk folder first. And if you've only just requested a link, give it a minute before trying again, as requests made too close together may be temporarily refused.

If a guest is having trouble getting into your gallery, the access code is usually the first thing to check. It needs to match exactly, so an old or mistyped code can prevent them from getting in.

You can find your current access code in Account, under Share Your Gallery. Send it to them again and make sure they're visiting your gallery's own web address rather than the main Newlyweds Gallery website.

Alternatively, send them your gallery link or QR code from Share Your Gallery. These already include the access code, so there's nothing for them to type.

If a photo can't be uploaded, we'll always tell you why. The Upload page shows any photos that didn't go through, along with the reason, while the rest of your batch continues uploading as normal.

“That photo is too large.” Each photo must be under 50MB. Photos taken on a phone will not come close to this, and nor will most photos from your photographer. The ones that do are usually camera RAW or TIFF files, or exports saved with no compression at all. Saving the photo as a JPEG, or exporting at slightly lower quality, will bring it comfortably within the limit.

“That file isn’t a photo Newlyweds Gallery can display.” We couldn't recognise the file as a supported image. This can happen with videos, PDFs, camera RAW files or files that have simply been renamed with a .jpg extension rather than properly converted.

“This gallery has reached its photo limit.” You've reached the photo allowance included with your plan. Your photos and guest photos have separate allowances, so we'll let you know which one is full.

If none of these apply, it may simply be a connection problem. If your internet connection drops during an upload, we'll mark that photo as unsuccessful rather than leaving a partially uploaded file behind. You can safely try the same folder again, and anything that has already been uploaded will be recognised and skipped.

If the same photo keeps failing and you're not sure why, get in touch with us. Send us the file name and the message you're seeing, and we'll take a look.

Large uploads continue processing in the background, so occasionally a photo may take a little longer to appear even after the upload panel says everything is complete. Refreshing the page is usually all that's needed.

If a photo is still missing, check the Upload page. Anything that couldn't be uploaded will be shown there along with the reason, and photos are never silently dropped.

We also automatically skip duplicates, so if the same photo is already in your gallery, it won't be added a second time.

Our prices are set in British pounds (GBP), which is what you'll see displayed on our website wherever you are in the world.

If you're paying with a non-UK card, checkout can show the price in your local currency and charge you in that currency. This includes USD, EUR and AUD, along with many others. You don't need to do anything, and you'll see the exact amount before you pay.

The converted price is based on the exchange rate at the time, so it may not be a round number. Your bank or card provider may also apply its own currency or international payment fees, which are separate from anything charged by Newlyweds Gallery.

Everything else works exactly the same wherever you are. Your gallery, photos and guest experience aren't affected by the country or currency you use.

No. Newlyweds Gallery works entirely in a web browser, so there's nothing for your guests to download or install.

They simply open your gallery link or scan your QR code on their phone, tablet or computer and they're straight in.

Yes. Your gallery isn't publicly listed or searchable, and guests need your access code to get in.

Your gallery link and QR code already include the access code, making them easy to share with the people you choose. Anyone who visits your gallery without the correct access code won't be able to enter.

Yes. You have full control over your gallery and can remove any photo, whether it was uploaded by you or one of your guests.

It's your gallery, so you always have the final say over what appears in it.

No. The limits are on photos, not people. Invite everyone.

Yes. Any photo can be saved from the full-screen view, by you or by your guests, and always at its full original resolution. Do this for anything you want to keep before your storage period ends.

Photo quality and downloading originals covers what you get and how it differs from what you see on screen.

Your gallery is created and available as soon as you pay. At checkout, you agree that we can begin providing the service straight away and acknowledge how this affects your 14-day right to cancel, as explained in our Terms.

This doesn't affect your statutory rights. If the service is faulty, isn't as described or hasn't been provided with reasonable care and skill, please get in touch. We'll work to put things right and, where appropriate, provide a refund.

Yes, and we'd recommend it. Setting up your gallery beforehand means everything is ready to share with your guests when the day arrives.

Just bear in mind that your 3 months of storage starts from the day you buy your gallery, rather than your wedding date. So if you'd like to keep it online for as long as possible after the wedding, it's worth considering when you set it up.