The VIP Role: What a Guest of Honour Can See on Your Event Dashboard
TIME&SPACE · Organiser's Playbook
TIME&SPACE has a fourth collaborator role beside Owner, Team member and Photographer: VIP. It cannot upload, delete or touch a single setting. What it opens instead is Insights, Live mode only, and nothing else.
In short: Beside Owner, Team member and Photographer, TIME&SPACE has a fourth collaborator role: VIP. It cannot upload a photo, delete one, change who sees it, open event settings, re-run face indexing, invite anyone, or even see the option to change the event's URL. The one thing a VIP gets is a seat on Insights, in Live mode only: the same real-time pulse an organiser checks on their phone mid-event. It is a role built to let someone watch an event happen, not to hand them any part of running it.
Owner, Team member and Photographer cover everyone actually running an event. VIP is a different kind of seat, for someone who has a reason to be close to an event without being staff on it: a client watching numbers climb on the night an agency delivers for them, or anyone an owner wants to let in on the live picture without handing them a single control.
What a VIP cannot do
The permission set behind a VIP collaborator is short because it is empty. No upload, no delete, no changing a photo's visibility, no settings, no re-indexing faces, no inviting anyone, no managing tags, no deleting the event, no viewing photos marked private, no managing who else is on the team. Every one of those is switched off.
That is not a shortened version of the Photographer role. It is the dashboard's safety default, the same permission set it hands back for a role it has never heard of at all. Owner, Team member and Photographer each get their own explicit set of switches. VIP gets none of them turned on, which means a VIP account can never accidentally gain a permission a future change forgets to deny. It starts, and stays, at zero.
What a VIP never even sees
A Team member or a Photographer who opens the Share page still sees the "Change event URL" section, greyed out, with a line explaining that only the owner can touch it. A VIP does not get that explanation. The section is not disabled for a VIP, it simply is not there. The dashboard does not describe what a VIP cannot do; it just never shows it the door.
What a VIP can do: Insights, Live only
Insights has three modes: Live, Analytics and Reports. A VIP opens Insights and only ever lands on Live, the page an organiser checks on their phone while an event is actually running. It shows the pulse of the last few minutes: scans, selfies taken, people matched to their photos, downloads, how many uploads are ready versus still indexing, check-ins, and an activity river covering the last two hours. It refreshes every 30 seconds while the tab stays open, and nothing on it can be edited, so a VIP sees the exact same numbers an owner does.
Try to force a different view with a direct link, say ?mode=analytics, and it falls back to Live instead of erroring. Analytics and Reports hold the event's full history and export tools, and both stay closed to a VIP no matter how the page is asked to open.
How someone becomes a VIP
An owner or team member invites by email from the event's settings and picks a role from a list, the same flow used for a Team member or Photographer invite. The difference that matters: inviting someone as a VIP never changes what kind of account they already have on TIME&SPACE. An invite to Owner or Team member turns any account into an organiser account. A VIP invite does not. It adds a seat on one event's Live view and nothing else about the person's account changes.
The short version
VIP is the narrowest seat on a TIME&SPACE dashboard: everything is denied by default, and the only door left open is Insights in Live mode, the same real-time view an organiser glances at from backstage. No uploads, no edits, no settings, not even a greyed-out hint of the controls everyone else can see. If the job is watching an event happen rather than running it, that is the whole role.
Founder, TIME&SPACE