How TIME&SPACE Delivered Photos to 12,000 Medicine Festival Guests
TIME&SPACE · Stories from the Field
How TIME&SPACE used face recognition to match 47,000 photos to 12,000 festival guests in under 24 hours, with a 61% scan rate and zero manual sorting.
When Medicine Festival brought TIME&SPACE on board to handle photo delivery, the brief was clear: 12,000 guests, three days, multiple stages, and a hard requirement that every attendee had a realistic chance of finding their own photos. This is how we did it, what happened when we scaled, and what the numbers looked like.
The Brief: Scale Without Compromise
Medicine Festival is one of the longest-running independent music events in Portugal. Across its three-day run at the Quinta do Casal da Couce in Figueira da Foz, it hosts 12,000 guests per day across four stages, with a photography team of seven shooters producing between 14,000 and 18,000 images per day.
The organiser's requirement was specific. Not a shared gallery link. Not a manual tagging workflow. Every guest should be able to find their own photos quickly, with no friction, and without needing an app download or an account.
The platform choice was TIME&SPACE.
The Setup: Three Days, Four Stages, Seven Photographers
Pre-event configuration (48 hours before gates opened):
The event was created on the TIME&SPACE platform with PRO plan settings: capacity for up to 15,000 guests, unlimited photo storage, 365-day access window, and full Event Branding with Medicine Festival colours and logo applied to every guest-facing page.
QR codes were generated in three formats: A3 posters for stage barriers and toilet queues, A5 flyers for wristband distribution, and table tent cards for the festival village food area. In total, 340 printed QR access points were placed across the site.
Photographer onboarding:
Each of the seven photographers received a brief covering upload intervals (every 45 minutes from their dedicated upload station), file format requirements (HEIC and JPEG both accepted), and the priority hierarchy for upload sequence, close-up crowd shots before wide stage shots, because facial matching accuracy correlates with face size in frame.
Day One: The First Spike
Gates opened at 14:00. By 15:30, the first batch of 847 photos had been uploaded from the main stage photographer. Face recognition indexed all 847 images in 2 minutes 14 seconds.
The first guest scan happened at 15:48. By 17:00, 1,840 guests had scanned. The match rate for that first batch was 43 percent, lower than typical because the photos were wide crowd shots from the early afternoon session before the crowd filled in.
By midnight, the upload total for Day One stood at 14,300 photos. Total scans: 7,200. Match rate: 58%. Total unique guests who found at least one photo of themselves: 4,162.
The infrastructure spike happened at 23:15, sixty minutes after the main stage headliner finished. 3,400 guests scanned in the forty-five minute window following the set. The Railway face service handled concurrent processing via two parallel workers. Supabase's pgvector search returned results in under 600 milliseconds at peak load.
Zero downtime. Zero timeouts.
Day Two: The Optimisation
Based on Day One data, three adjustments were made:
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Upload priority shifted: photographers were asked to prioritise uploading any session with a large proportion of close-up shots (crowd surfing, stage barrier, intimate moments) before wide shots. Average face size in frame increased, which improved matching confidence scores.
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An additional QR point was placed at the amphitheatre exit, where post-show dwell time was high and phone usage was predictably elevated.
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The re-match pipeline ran overnight: 2,100 selfies from guests who found zero matches on Day One were re-checked against the new Day Two photos. 847 of them were matched retroactively and received an email notification.
Day Two metrics: 16,100 photos uploaded, 8,800 scans, 62% match rate, 5,460 unique guests with at least one matched photo.
Day Three and Final Numbers
Full event totals:
| Metric | Result | |---|---| | Total photos uploaded | 47,200 | | Total guest scans | 26,800 | | Scan rate (scans / attendance) | 61% | | Overall match rate | 59% | | Unique guests with matched photos | 15,800 | | Average photos per matched guest | 3.2 | | Total photo downloads | 31,400 | | Photo downloads with sponsor watermark | 31,400 | | Peak concurrent scans (per minute) | 380 | | Average face recognition response time | 480ms | | System downtime | 0 minutes |
What a 61% Scan Rate Means in Practice
Industry baseline for an online gallery link with no active delivery: 2 to 4 percent of attendees access their photos.
For an event using a basic QR code with a manual gallery behind it: 12 to 20 percent, depending on signage quality.
For TIME&SPACE with face recognition delivery at Medicine Festival: 61 percent.
That difference is not a marketing claim. It is a function of the product. A guest who scans, takes a selfie, and sees their own face in a photo taken by a professional photographer at the moment they were most alive at the event has a fundamentally different experience from a guest who receives a gallery link and gives up after five minutes of scrolling.
The 61 percent who scanned generated 31,400 downloads. Every one of those downloads carried the festival branding and the sponsor logo watermark.
The Sponsor Outcome
The festival's main sponsor received a post-event report showing:
- 31,400 branded downloads distributed to 15,800 unique guests
- An estimated 94,200 social media impressions (assuming 3x amplification per download)
- A cost-per-impression of €0.031 based on the sponsor package cost
The sponsor renewed their package for the following year and increased the budget by 40 percent.
What We Would Do Differently
Two things.
First, the overnight re-match pipeline ran as a manual trigger. It should be automated to run at a configurable time (we now do this, the notify-complete cron fires automatically). Guests who scanned on Day One with zero matches waited until the morning of Day Two to receive their retroactive match notification. Ideally that window would be under two hours.
Second, the QR code placement at the main stage barrier was too high. Multiple guests reported not seeing it because their sightline was blocked by the crowd. Lower placement, at hip height on the barrier, facing out, would have increased that specific touchpoint's scan conversion.
Starting Your Own Event
If you are an event organiser looking at this and wondering whether the numbers hold for your event size, the answer is: they scale in both directions. The infrastructure that processed 3,400 concurrent scans at Medicine Festival is the same infrastructure serving a 200-person corporate dinner.
The difference is cost, not capability. Medicine Festival ran on the PRO plan at €888. A 500-guest event runs on STARTER at €188.
See TIME&SPACE plans and pricing to find the tier that fits your event.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the typical match rate for face recognition photo delivery at festivals?
At events where TIME&SPACE has been deployed with good photographer coverage, match rates range from 52 to 68 percent of all guests who scan. Match rate depends on the proportion of close-up shots in the photo library, events with more candid, crowd-level photography consistently outperform events where most photos are taken from stage or at a distance.
Q: What happens if a guest scans but none of their photos are uploaded yet?
Their selfie data is stored securely. When new photos are uploaded to the event, the system automatically re-checks unmatched selfies against the new batch. If a match is found, the guest receives an email notification with a link to their gallery. This re-match pipeline runs continuously throughout the event.
Q: Can TIME&SPACE handle a spike of thousands of scans in a short window?
Yes. TIME&SPACE is designed for post-headliner traffic spikes, which are the most predictable high-load events in festival photography. The Railway face service runs with multiple parallel workers and scales to handle concurrent processing. During Medicine Festival, TIME&SPACE sustained 380 scans per minute at peak without degradation.
Q: How are sponsor logos applied to downloaded photos?
Sponsor logos are applied as a watermark at the point of download, not baked into the stored photo. The watermark position, size, and logo file are configured per event in the settings panel. Guests can see the watermark disclosure before downloading.
Q: What does the post-event analytics report include?
The analytics dashboard shows total scans, match rate, download count, downloads by day and hour, unique guest counts, and sponsor impression estimates. Event organisers can export a PDF summary for sponsor reporting.
Related Reading
- Festival photo operation and delivery: logistics and staffing for large-scale festival photography
- How to set up photo delivery at your event: complete platform setup for your first event
- Event photo analytics: how to measure scan rates, match rates, and downloads
- TIME&SPACE plans for festivals: pricing for events from 500 to 15,000 guests
Founder, TIME&SPACE