Twelve Questions to Ask a Photo Delivery Vendor
TIME&SPACE · Business of Events
Demos are designed to look good. These are the questions that separate a product that works at your event from one that works in a sales call.
Twelve Questions to Ask a Photo Delivery Vendor
In short: Ask about the failure cases, not the happy path. Every vendor can show you a successful scan. Far fewer can tell you what happens when the venue wifi dies or a guest asks to be removed.
We sell one of these products, so treat this accordingly. It is also the list we would want asked of us, because the vendors who dodge these questions are the reason organisers arrive sceptical.
On the guest experience
1. What does a guest do if the scan finds nothing? Zero results is the most common bad moment. Ask whether the guest is simply told no, or whether they can leave a way to be notified when more photographs arrive. Pre-registration before photographs are uploaded is a genuine differentiator.
2. What does the guest need to install? The answer should be nothing. An app download between a guest and their photographs loses most of them.
3. How many taps from QR code to photographs? Count them in the demo yourself. Anything past four and you will feel it in your download numbers.
4. What happens on a bad connection? Venues have bad wifi. Ask what a guest sees on 3G in a basement.
On the photographs
5. What resolution does the guest actually get? Some products deliver a heavily compressed file and reserve the good one for a paid upgrade. Know which you are buying.
6. How long do the photographs stay up, and what happens then? Get a number. Then ask whether guests are warned before it expires.
7. Can I get everything back out? If you stop using them, do you get your originals, in full resolution, without a fight?
On compliance
8. Where is the data stored? For an EU event this is a real question, not a formality.
9. How is consent for face processing collected? Biometric data needs explicit consent, separate from a general photography notice. Ask to see the actual screen. If consent is bundled into a cookie banner or a terms checkbox, that is not explicit consent.
10. How do I remove one person from everything? Every event eventually has this request. Ask them to demonstrate it rather than describe it. The process side of this is in handling photo takedown requests.
11. What happens to the selfie? It should be deleted on a short clock, separate from the photographs. A vendor who cannot tell you the retention period for a selfie has not thought about it.
On the commercial terms
12. What is the price at my actual size, including the parts that are not in the headline? Ask for the total for your guest count and photograph count, including any per-download, per-guest or storage charges. Compare the total, not the headline.
The two answers that should worry you
"Accuracy is 99 point something." An aggregate accuracy number without a described test set means very little, and it says nothing about whether performance holds across different groups of people. The right answer describes how it was measured. How facial recognition accuracy works covers what those numbers can and cannot tell you.
"Nobody has ever asked that." For question 10, this means they have not built it.
Before you ask any of it
Know what you are optimising for. An organiser who wants guests to have their photographs quickly is buying a different product from one who wants a branded asset library. Both are legitimate, and the questions above weight differently depending which you are. What to look for in event photo delivery software is a useful starting point for working out which one you are.
Founder, TIME&SPACE