Guide
Live delivery vs face search: what each does for your guests
Two features decide how guests get their event photos. Live delivery is about when: each photo reaches the gallery while the event is on. Face search is about which: each guest sees only the photos they are in. They solve different problems, and work best together.
By Bijay Kanshi · Updated
The short answer
| What matters | Live delivery | Face search |
|---|---|---|
| The question it answers | “When do we get the photos?” | “Where am I in 3,000 photos?” |
| How it works | The camera's FTP sends each JPEG to the gallery as you shoot | A guest takes one selfie and sees only the photos they are in |
| When guests see a photo | Within about half a minute of the shot | As soon as it is in the gallery |
| What the guest needs | The QR or link, in any phone browser | The SnapMila app (Android now, iPhone coming) |
| What the photographer does | Sets up the camera once | Nothing; it works on every event |
Live delivery: photos during the event
Without live delivery, guests wait days for a Drive link, or for the photographer to copy cards to a laptop and upload. With it, the camera's built-in FTP sends each photo to the gallery over the venue Wi-Fi or a phone hotspot, and guests watch the gallery fill while the event goes on.
- Guests open the gallery with the QR, newest photo first, and save any photo in full quality.
- The TV page plays the photos on the hall's screen as they arrive.
- The photographer hides a blink or an awkward moment in one tap, and can show it again later.
- The app names any file number that didn't arrive, so nothing goes missing quietly.
Face search: each guest sees only their photos
A big gallery is hard to scroll. With face search, a guest takes one selfie in the SnapMila app and sees only the photos they are in.
- With “Send me new photos of me” on, the guest gets an alert as new photos of them arrive, at most one every two minutes.
- On a photographer's studio page, one selfie finds the guest across every event shown there.
- The selfie becomes a face code of 128 numbers, not a picture, and only this event's photos are searched.
When live delivery matters most
- Corporate events: the social team posts while the hashtag is live, and speakers share their stage photos the same day.
- Weddings, for the family watching from another city or another country.
- Award nights, where every winner wants the photo on stage right away.
- Small events, such as a birthday with 60 guests. Scrolling a few hundred photos is easy, so live delivery is most of the value.
When face search matters most
- Conferences with hundreds of attendees, each wanting their own stage or networking photos.
- Weddings with several functions and a few thousand photos.
- College fests and sports days, where most guests appear in only a handful of photos.
Why they work best together
Face search can only find photos that are already in the gallery. If the photos go up a week after the event, the selfie waits a week too. On a live gallery, SnapMila finds the faces in each photo as it arrives from the camera, so a guest who searches during the event finds the photo taken a minute ago, and alerts reach guests while the photographer is still shooting.
What neither one does
- Galleries show photos, not video, and are built from JPEGs; RAW files are not stored.
- Face search may miss a face that is very small in the frame, at the back of a big group, or turned well away. The full gallery always has every photo.
- Guests on an iPhone browse the full gallery in the browser until the iPhone app arrives.
On SnapMila
Both come with every plan, Free too: see pricing. More on each: face search, the guest steps in Find your photos with a selfie, and the network for live delivery in Camera FTP over Wi-Fi or a hotspot.