What Wedding Guests Did When Photos Were Worth Points

We added a photo wall to QuizYourGuests where every photo a guest adds earns points for their team. It's a recent addition to our game, but guests seem to really enjoy it. Here's why it works, including a few things I didn't expect.

The last time I did one of these, for what 300 wedding guests taught us about quizzes, I had a few hundred players to work with. The photo wall is relatively new, and only a few weddings have used it so far. So treat everything below as anecdotes rather than statistics. I still think it's worth writing up (hey, these blog posts don't write themselves!), and it's been a common question from our customers before. Let's start with the big question: will your guests actually share their photos with you?

Most guests joined in

61% of guests who played added at least one photo. I don't know how many folks haven't scanned our QR codes, of course, but that's a healthy ratio.

For context, the usual experience with a shared album link is a handful of uploads from your most organised friends. We ended up with six folders in the shared Dropbox link we passed round after our wedding. More than half the room taking part is a different kind of result, and I wish we could have had this, too.

The weddings ended up with around 120 photos on average. That's roughly two photos for every guest who joined the game.

A few guests carry the wall

Most people added one or two. The typical guest who uploaded anything added 2 photos. But in our experience, the five keenest photographers post roughly 40 to 45% of everything on the wall. It's nice that we're able to cover both: the eager reporter and the occasional poster.

You can even plan for this: every wedding has three or four people who will happily be the unofficial photographer if they're given a reason. If you know who they are, tell them about the wall in advance. They're the ones who will kick it all off, which is what gets everyone else started.

People didn't (only) upload for the points

Only the first five photos from each guest earn points. We added the cap so nobody could win the quiz by sending lots of table photos, and I half expected to see a pile of guests stopping at exactly five.

This didn't happen. More guests stop at four than at five, and 26% of all photos were added after the guest had passed the cap, when they were "worth" nothing at all (in points, of course).

As much as I like the competitive aspect of QuizYourGuests, this was a relief. Points get people to take the first photo. After that, they keep going because the wall is fun, and because other people are looking at what they post.

Photos start before the party does

27% of all photos arrived before the quiz had even started. This could be due to multiple reasons, but my personal theory is that the early hours of weddings tend to be a bit more boring, and guests are grateful to find something to do (more on that part of the day in the wedding reception timeline post). Almost nothing came in after the end: 2% of photos, even though the wall stays open for twelve hours.

Likes went from nothing to everything

This is where we saw big differences between weddings. At one extreme, only 20% of photos got a like. At the other, nearly every single one did, with a median of 6 likes per photo. I really did not expect this.

I'm not sure what causes this. Wedding guests are as different as the couples they're celebrating: the time of day, the number of guests and the average age might all have something to do with it. But my guess is that the screen is most of it: a photo that appears in front of the whole room gets looked at, and one that only lives on phones mostly doesn't.

What I'd do with this

• Encourage photos early, and let people know how to do it. The first hour is where a lot of the photos came in.
• Tell your three or four natural photographers in advance. They'll carry the early part of the wall.
• Put it on a screen if the venue has one. A photo wall nobody can see is a wall nobody likes.
• Don't worry too much about how it interacts with the quiz. We have not seen any signs of over-eager use just for the sake of points. It's a bad look to cheat at a wedding, and people just don't do it.

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Want to try it with your own guests? QuizYourGuests has the photo wall, friend numbers and the quiz behind one QR code, and all of it is in the free version with no limit on guests. Try the demo to see what a guest sees.