Atmosphere Photos: The Shots That Show Up Before Anyone Scans a Selfie
TIME&SPACE · Organiser's Playbook
On every TIME&SPACE plan, photos with no recognisable face, crowd shots, venue details, stage wides, publish themselves to your event page automatically. No selfie required, no organiser action needed.
Atmosphere Photos: The Shots That Show Up Before Anyone Scans a Selfie
In short: Face recognition only delivers a photo to a guest whose face appears in it. A photo with no recognisable face, a wide shot of the crowd, the venue before doors open, a decoration detail, still gets taken by your photographer, and on every TIME&SPACE plan it publishes itself to your event's gallery automatically. No guest has to scan anything to see it, and no organiser has to tag it by hand. This is on by default, and it is what makes a gallery look alive before a single guest has found their own photos.
A photographer at any event shoots far more than faces. Wide shots of the room filling up, a stage before the lights come on, string lights over a courtyard, a logo on a step-and-repeat. None of it matches to a person, because there is no face in the frame to match. Left to face recognition alone, every one of those photos would sit invisible, correctly processed and correctly showing nobody, forever.
What happens to a photo with no face in it
When your photographer's upload finishes processing, each photo gets a status. A photo where the detector finds a face becomes READY and is held privately until a guest's own selfie matches it. A photo where the detector finds nothing becomes NO_FACES, and that status is the trigger: with the atmosphere setting on, a NO_FACES photo is marked public the moment it finishes processing. It does not wait for a guest, an organiser, or a schedule.
Where guests actually see it
These public photos show up in the "From the gallery" preview on your event's own page, timeandspace.app/e/[your-event], visible to anyone who opens the link, before they have taken a selfie or found a single photo of themselves. The same public set is what an embedded gallery widget shows on your own website, if you use one. A guest arriving at your event page for the first time is not looking at an empty shell waiting for a face scan: they are looking at a gallery that already has real photos in it.
It is on by default, and it is the same on every plan
Atmosphere publishing defaults to on for every new event, STARTER through PRO, because a gallery with nothing in it until the first scan completes looks unfinished, and the fix costs nothing: these are photos nobody's selfie could have claimed anyway. You can turn it off per event in Settings, under "Auto-publish atmosphere photos" in the guest access section, if a shoot's unmatched photos are not ones you want public (a venue under NDA, an early access area, a security angle). It is a toggle, not a plan feature: no tier gates it and no tier removes it.
What it is not
It is not a way to make a guest's own matched photos public, and turning it off does not hide anyone's face: a READY photo with a face in it stays behind the face-match flow regardless of this setting, on every plan, always. Atmosphere publishing only ever touches the photos nobody's selfie was ever going to find.
The short version
Photos with no recognisable face publish themselves to your event's public gallery the moment they finish processing, on every plan, by default, with no organiser action and no guest scan required. Turn it off per event if you need to; leave it on and your gallery stops looking empty on day one.
Founder, TIME&SPACE