Roster Invites: Automatic Photo Delivery for Speakers and Performers
TIME&SPACE · Organiser's Playbook
A roster invite lets an organiser add a speaker or performer by name and email before the event even happens. If they agree and leave one photo of themselves, TIME&SPACE finds them in the uploaded photos and emails their photos automatically, no QR code, no gallery visit.
Roster Invites: Automatic Photo Delivery for Speakers and Performers
In short: A roster invite lets an organiser add a speaker, performer or artist by name and email before the event happens. If that person agrees and leaves one photo of themselves, TIME&SPACE finds them in whatever the photographers upload and emails their photos automatically. No QR code, no scan, no visit to the gallery.
We've written before about why the people on stage are usually the last to get a usable photo of themselves. The roster invite is the built answer to that problem rather than an argument for solving it by hand.
What the organiser actually does
Add a name and an email in your event dashboard, one line per person. An Instagram handle is optional and is a label only, never a consent path. That's the whole organiser side of it.
The organiser never gives us a face. This matters more than it sounds: a photo of someone that an organiser happens to have, even one covered by a performance contract, is not consent for biometric matching. GDPR Article 9(2)(a) requires that consent from the person themselves, for this specific purpose. A contract that permits promotional use of a headshot is a different purpose with a different controller.
What the speaker or performer sees
An email: " added you to . If you say yes, we will recognise you in the event photos and send you yours automatically." Two buttons, yes or no.
Saying yes opens a consent screen with the same explicit, unticked checkbox every guest sees before a face scan: this is biometric data, it's used only for this event, and it can be withdrawn. Only after that do they take a selfie or upload a photo, live or from their camera roll, since not every green room has good light. Nothing biometric exists before that tick.
Saying no deletes their details and ends it there. No second email, no upsell.
Delivery is automatic, and it only happens once
Once the photographers upload and face matching finds that person, one email goes out with their photos. The check runs every minute inside the same job queue that indexes every other photo, not on a nightly batch, so delivery can land within minutes of the right photo being processed.
Nobody gets emailed twice. A late batch three days after the first doesn't resend; only people still unmatched are even checked. At most three emails ever reach an invited person: the invite, a day-7 nudge if they haven't answered, and one more if the event's photos go live before they've responded. After that, silence until their invite expires.
Why this is separate from the ordinary QR scan
A guest scanning at the event is making a live decision, in the moment, at a station they can see. A performer who played a 20-minute set and left for the airport was never going to be at that station. The roster invite moves the decision earlier and off-site: it can be answered from a phone on the way home, days before any photo exists to match against.
It also solves a problem choosing a scan vs a QR code at the venue doesn't: it works for someone who was never handed a QR card at all, because the organiser already had their contact details from booking them.
What happens to the face data
Published plainly to every invitee: kept until 30 days after their photos are sent, and never more than 90 days if no photos are ever uploaded for that event. The clock starts from delivery, not from the moment they say yes, because consent often arrives weeks before any photographer uploads a single file. Starting the clock any earlier would delete the match data before it had done its job.
The short version
A roster invite is a named, consent-first alternative to the QR scan, built for people whose relationship to the event is a booking rather than a ticket. The organiser supplies a name and an email. The person supplies their own face, their own consent, and nothing else is required of them. Delivery is automatic, happens once, and the data behind it has a published expiry.
Founder, TIME&SPACE