TIME&SPACE vs Other Event Photo Delivery Platforms: Why Every Guest Gets Their Own Photos
TIME&SPACE · Business of Events
How TIME&SPACE compares with Pixieset, Pic-Time and gallery links: face recognition, per-event pricing and EU privacy, so every guest gets their photos.
Event photo delivery platforms range from basic gallery links to AI-powered face recognition systems, with significant differences in what guests actually experience and what organisers can measure. This comparison covers the platforms event organisers in Europe most frequently evaluate, and shows why face recognition delivery is the one built for events.
Why Platform Choice Matters More Than It Looks
Most organisers think about event photography as a photography problem. They focus on the photographer, the brief, the editing turnaround. The platform is an afterthought.
This is backwards.
A world class photographer with a basic gallery link still asks every guest to do the work: open a folder of three thousand images and find themselves in it. Face recognition removes that step. The guest takes one selfie and receives only the frames they appear in. The difference is not the photography. It is whether being found is the guest's job or the platform's.
Platform choice determines how many guests find their photos, how many download them, how many share them, and how much sponsor value is generated per event.
The Platforms Being Compared
This comparison covers five categories:
- TIME&SPACE, AI-powered face recognition delivery, EU-based, per-event pricing
- Pixieset, Photographer-focused gallery platform, subscription model
- Pic-Time, Professional gallery platform with some automation, subscription model
- Basic gallery links, Google Photos, Dropbox, WeTransfer, Facebook albums
- Badge-scan systems, QR codes tied to session-level galleries, not individual guests
Feature Comparison
| Feature | TIME&SPACE | Pixieset | Pic-Time | Basic Gallery | Badge Scan | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Face recognition matching | Yes | No | No | No | No | | Guest finds their own photos | Automatically | Manual browsing | Manual browsing | Manual browsing | Session-level only | | Per-event pricing | Yes | No (subscription) | No (subscription) | Free or flat fee | Custom | | Sponsor watermarking | Automatic | Manual setup | Manual setup | None | None | | GDPR biometric compliance | Built in | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | | Analytics dashboard | Scans, matches, downloads | Download stats | Client activity | None | None | | Event branding (colours, logo) | Per event | Per gallery | Per gallery | None | None | | QR code access | Yes | Requires setup | Requires setup | Via link only | Core feature | | HEIC (iPhone) upload | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Varies | | Guest email delivery | Yes | Via photographer | Via photographer | Manual | Manual | | Multi-photographer events | Yes | With setup | With setup | Messy | Possible | | Re-match for late uploads | Automated | No | No | No | No |
Capabilities in this table are the ones a buyer can observe in each product. We do not publish comparative performance figures, ours or anyone else's, because a delivery rate depends on the event, the signage and the photographer far more than on the software, and any number quoted without that context is marketing rather than evidence. Measure it at your own event.
On hosting and data: TIME&SPACE runs in the EU, takes explicit consent before the selfie and deletes selfie data after 30 days, all stated in our privacy policy. Pixieset is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. For every vendor here, including us, read the current terms before you sign: hosting locations and retention windows change, and a comparison table is a snapshot, not a guarantee.
TIME&SPACE vs Pixieset
What Pixieset is: a gallery platform for photography studios, with client proofing and print store integration, sold to photographers on a subscription. It is designed for a photographer delivering photos to a single client, such as a couple or a company.
Where TIME&SPACE wins: Pixieset is built for one photographer delivering to one client. Events are a different problem: one event, hundreds or thousands of guests, each of whom appears in photos they have no way to find in a flat gallery of 3,000 images. Pixieset has no face recognition, no per-guest personalisation, and no event-specific scan analytics. It is not built for this use case.
The honest summary: If you are an event organiser, Pixieset is a photographer's tool that happens to produce a gallery. You will get your archive. Your guests will not get their photos.
TIME&SPACE vs Pic-Time
What Pic-Time is: a professional gallery platform for photographers, with automated marketing emails, album reminders and print suggestions, sold on a subscription.
Where TIME&SPACE wins: Pic-Time's automation is email-based and photographer-managed. The guest experience still involves browsing a flat gallery. There is no face recognition, no personalised matching, and no event-specific infrastructure for multi-photographer bulk uploads during the event. For large events with thousands of guests, Pic-Time's workflow breaks down at scale.
The honest summary: Pic-Time shares the same fundamental limitation as Pixieset: it is built for curated photography delivery to a known client, not mass-personalised delivery to thousands of anonymous event attendees.
TIME&SPACE vs Basic Gallery Links
Google Photos, Dropbox, WeTransfer, Facebook albums. Free, familiar, zero friction to set up.
What you get: A link. Every guest gets the same link to the same gallery of thousands of photos. Guests who want their own photos must scroll, search, or give up.
What you don't get: Face recognition. Guest-level analytics. Sponsor watermarking. GDPR compliance tools for biometric data. Event branding. Download tracking. Re-match for late uploads.
The real barrier is effort, not technology. A guest who receives a 3,000-photo gallery link with no personalisation has to scroll through strangers to find themselves, with no guarantee they are in there at all. The photo might be there. It might not. The expected effort outweighs the expected reward, so most people never start. Personalised delivery removes the gamble: you either appear in the results or you do not, and you know within seconds.
The honest summary: Basic gallery links are fine for small events where the organiser personally knows all attendees and can distribute specific photos manually. For anything above 50 guests, the maths turn against you quickly.
TIME&SPACE vs Badge-Scan Systems
Some event technology providers offer QR-code systems tied to attendee badges or wristbands. The attendee scans their badge at a photo station, and the system shows them the photos from the session they were in.
Where this works: Very structured events with discrete, trackable sessions, a tradeshow where each attendee checks into specific booths, a conference with a fixed schedule of known rooms. If the event has clean session data, badge scanning can attribute photos to sessions with good accuracy.
Where it breaks down: Open-format events (festivals, parties, networking events) where guests move freely between spaces have no clean session attribution. A guest who walks through three stages, two catering areas, and a backstage access zone in one evening cannot be attributed to a session-level gallery that means anything. The photo they want, the crowd-surf moment at Stage 2 at 11:47pm, does not appear in their "Main Stage Session" gallery.
Face recognition is also better at candid photography. Badge scanning requires the attendee to be scanned at a checkpoint. Face recognition works from any photo where their face appears, including candid crowd shots taken from a distance.
The honest summary: Badge scan systems work for conferences. They do not work for festivals, parties, or any event where guests move freely.
Pricing Comparison
| Platform | Model | Entry Price | What You Get | |---|---|---|---| | TIME&SPACE | Per event | €188 / event | 500 guests, 1,500 photos, face recognition, analytics | | TIME&SPACE | Per event | €488 / event | 2,000 guests, 5,000 photos, Event Branding, sponsor tools | | TIME&SPACE | Per event | €888 / event | 10,000 guests, unlimited photos, full feature set | | Pixieset | Annual subscription | ~€276 / year | Unlimited galleries, no face recognition, no event tools | | Pic-Time | Annual subscription | ~€300 to €600 / year | Automated marketing, no face recognition, no event tools | | Basic tools | Free or flat fee | €0 | Gallery link, no delivery infrastructure |
The key distinction in pricing models: Pixieset and Pic-Time charge annually regardless of how many events you run. TIME&SPACE charges per event. For photographers or organisers who run 1 to 4 events per year, per-event pricing is significantly cheaper than an annual subscription. You pay for the event you are running, and the gallery stays live for 365 days on every plan. Past events are 50% off, and guests never pay.
Who TIME&SPACE Is Built For
Your event is promoted before it happens. Every public event on TIME&SPACE is listed in the TIME&SPACE app, where people nearby discover what is on, save the events they like, and get a reminder the evening before and again a few hours before it starts, with a link straight to your tickets. Most photo platforms only start working once the event is over. Ours starts working for you before the doors open.
Your sponsors get their own photos. With the Sponsor Package, we find the photos where each sponsor's logo appears and give every sponsor a gallery of them, ready to download and post. 10 EUR per sponsor, minimum 80 EUR, plus VAT.
Guests hear about new photos. A guest who opts in is emailed when more photos of them are uploaded, so late uploads still reach the right people without anyone scanning again.
Organisers with more guests than they can sort for by hand. Conferences, festivals, brand activations, sports events and galas, where hundreds or thousands of people each want their own photos.
Events with photographers uploading during or after the night. Every upload is indexed, and guests who scanned before the photos arrived are matched automatically when they land.
Organisers who answer to sponsors. Event Branding, sponsor logo watermarks on guest downloads (ADVANCED and PRO) and analytics on scans, matches and downloads show sponsors what their presence delivered.
The Summary
TIME&SPACE was built for a problem that existing platforms were not designed to solve: delivering the right photos to thousands of individual guests at a large event, automatically, without manual sorting, without apps, and with full GDPR compliance for facial data.
If that is the problem you have, no other platform in this comparison solves it.
Compare TIME&SPACE plans and start your first event
Related Reading
- Event Photo Delivery Software: A Buyer's Guide: how to evaluate any delivery tool before you commit
- Face Recognition vs QR Codes for Event Photo Delivery: a direct comparison of the two main guest access methods
- TIME&SPACE vs Memzo: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs TurtlePic: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs FotoOwl: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs Photier: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs PhotoMea: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs Fotop: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs Honcho: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs Pixieset: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs Fotify: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs GetPica: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs Memento: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs Premagic: a sourced side-by-side
- TIME&SPACE vs Sportograf: a sourced side-by-side
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Does TIME&SPACE work for events outside Portugal?
Yes. TIME&SPACE is available to event organisers across Europe. The platform stores all data in the EU (Supabase EU region and Railway europe-west4), which is relevant for GDPR compliance. Language support is currently English, with Portuguese fully supported.
Q: Can a photographer use TIME&SPACE with their existing clients?
Yes. Photographers can join the TIME&SPACE platform and use it to deliver photos from any event to their clients' guests. They earn a 10% referral commission on the event fee when they refer the organiser. See the for photographers page for details.
Q: Is face recognition optional for guests?
Yes. Face recognition requires explicit consent before any selfie is processed. Guests who prefer not to use face recognition can still access the event gallery and browse photos manually.
Q: What happens to guest facial data after the event?
Selfie data (the facial descriptor used for matching) is automatically deleted after 30 days in compliance with GDPR Article 9. The matched photos remain accessible for the duration of the event's retention period, but the biometric data used to create the match is not retained.
Q: Can multiple photographers upload to the same event?
Yes. Multiple photographers can be added as team members on an event. All uploads appear in the same gallery and are processed through the same face recognition pipeline. There is no limit on the number of photographers per event.
Q: What is the best alternative to Pixieset or Pic-Time for event photo delivery?
TIME&SPACE. Each guest takes one selfie and sees only the photos they appear in, with no app and no account. Pricing is per event from 188 EUR, the gallery stays live for 365 days, biometric data is processed in the EU behind an unticked consent box, and selfies are deleted after 30 days.
Q: Does TIME&SPACE help promote the event before it happens?
Yes. Every public event is listed in the TIME&SPACE app, where people discover it, save it and get reminders before it starts, with a link to your tickets. After the event, the same guests find their photos with one selfie.
Founder, TIME&SPACE