What actually happens to your wedding photos after the big day

This is the question we get asked most after “how much does it cost,” and it’s a fair one. You’re handing a company every photo and video from one of the biggest nights of your life. It’s worth knowing what actually happens to it.

Who can see the gallery while it’s live

By default, a Dayfolds gallery is private: visible only to people with the link, not indexed by search engines, no public social feed layered on top. You can choose to let guests browse what’s already been uploaded during the event itself, or keep it host-only until you’ve reviewed everything. Either way, nobody’s stumbling onto your wedding gallery who wasn’t given the link.

What “original quality” actually means

The version shown in the gallery while you’re browsing on your phone is a compressed preview, because that’s what loads fast on bad venue wifi. The file sitting behind it, the one a guest actually uploaded, is never touched. When you download everything at the end, you get that untouched original: full resolution photos, full quality video, nothing recompressed a second time.

How long the photos actually stay up

Here’s the part most platforms bury in a FAQ page. Dayfolds keeps your gallery live for three months after your event date, then the media is deleted and the gallery is retired. Three months is enough time to get through the fog of thank-you cards and settle in, but it’s not forever, and we’d rather be upfront about that than imply we’re a permanent archive we’re not actually committed to being.

The fix is simple: download everything before the window closes. One button, one zip file, every original. Set yourself a calendar reminder for a month after the wedding and you’ll never be close to the deadline.

Why we don’t just keep everything forever

A couple of reasons. Storing original-quality photos and video for thousands of events indefinitely is expensive, and that cost eventually shows up in your price whether it’s visible or not. More importantly, “we’ll hold onto your data forever, trust us” isn’t actually a promise worth much from any company, ours included. A clear expiration date you can plan around is more honest than a vague one we might change later.

If you want your photos kept somewhere permanent, which you should, that’s what the download is for. Drop them in whatever you already use for family photos. We’re the fast, no-login way to collect everything from two hundred phones in one night. We were never meant to be the archive.