Photo Visibility: Public, Match Only, or Private
TIME&SPACE · Organiser's Playbook
Every photo on TIME&SPACE carries one of three visibility settings. Public sits in the gallery for anyone to browse. Match Only is delivered only to the guest whose selfie matches it. Private never reaches a guest at all, not even that same guest.
Photo Visibility: Public, Match Only, or Private
In short: Every photo uploaded to an event carries one of three visibility settings. Public puts it in the browsable gallery and in face-match results. Match Only keeps it out of the gallery but still delivers it to the one guest whose selfie matches it. Private excludes it from face matching entirely, so no guest, including the person in the photo, ever sees it through the platform.
Not every photo from an event belongs in a gallery anyone can scroll. A few belong only to the one person in them, and a few should not reach a guest at all. TIME&SPACE treats that as a setting on the photo, not a separate product.
The three settings
Public. The default for every upload. A public photo sits in the event's browsable gallery, where anyone with the event link can see it, and it is included when a guest's selfie is checked for a match.
Match Only. The photo is hidden from the public gallery entirely, but it is still checked against guest selfies. If a guest's face matches it, that photo appears in their own results and they can save and share it exactly like a public one. Nobody browsing the gallery ever sees it, and nobody who did not match it can reach it by guessing or sharing a link, the download route checks for proof of the match first.
Private. The photo is excluded from face matching at the database level, not just hidden from view. It never enters a guest's results, never mind whose face is in it. Only the owner and the event's team can see it, from inside the dashboard.
Who can set it
Changing a photo's visibility uses the same permission as changing anything else about a photo: the owner, any team member, and the photographer who uploaded it can all do it, one photo at a time or in bulk across a selection. It can be set at upload, in a batch, or changed later from the event's photo grid. Full breakdown of what each role can touch: Event Team Roles.
Why an organiser uses Match Only
A speaker's candid backstage photo, a VIP area shot, a moment at an award ceremony before the result is announced: all of these are fine for the one person in them to have, and wrong for a stranger scrolling the public gallery to stumble on. Match Only delivers the photo to exactly the person it belongs to without putting it on display for everyone else.
Why an organiser uses Private
A photographer's raw take usually includes frames that never should have left the camera: eyes closed, someone mid-sentence, a test shot before the real sequence starts. Marking those Private keeps them in the event for the team's own reference without any risk of one surfacing in a guest's results by accident.
The short version
Public is the gallery. Match Only is a photo that still finds its one person without being on display. Private is a photo that finds nobody, by design, enforced at the point faces are matched rather than only at the point a photo is shown.
Founder, TIME&SPACE