Their photos,on the big screen.

Less than most couples expect. A screen, a link, and nothing to prepare beforehand.

A traditional wedding slideshow is a file. Someone collects the photos weeks early, arranges them, exports a video, and tests it on the venue’s equipment. It shows the day you had before today, and it is finished before the first guest arrives.

A live one is a web page. If the venue has a smart TV, open the link in its browser. If it has a projector, plug a laptop in over HDMI and open it there. It fills the screen, it starts with whatever has already been uploaded, and it keeps going on its own for as long as the party lasts. There is no file to build, so there is nothing to finish late and nothing to forget on a USB stick.

A QR code in the corner of a screen cannot be scanned from a table. It is not a design preference. It is arithmetic.

A QR code scans reliably from roughly ten times its own width. A 55-inch television is about 122 centimetres wide, so a code on it that could be read from five metres would have to be about fifty centimetres across, more than a third of the screen. The tasteful corner code every slideshow puts there, ours included, is about eight centimetres across on that screen, which is good for about eighty centimetres and for nowhere else in the room.

So Glint’s slideshow carries both. A small code sits in the corner over the photos for anyone walking past, beside a running count of the guests and photos so far, and you can switch that one off. Every so often the code takes a full screen of its own, under your event name and above the link written out in full, and that one appears whether or not the corner code is showing. At full screen the code is about twenty centimetres across on that television, which works from about two metres, so it covers the nearest tables rather than the whole room. On a projector the same slide is far bigger in absolute terms, and a two-and-a-half-metre-wide image puts the code at about forty centimetres across, so about four metres, which does reach the back. How often it appears depends on the room: when uploads have gone quiet it asks more frequently, and when photos are already flowing it gets out of the way.

Scanning distance varies with camera quality, lighting and screen brightness. Ten times the code’s width is the working rule of thumb, not a guarantee, and the centimetre figures above scale with the screen: they are what a 55-inch television gives you.

Eight seconds a photo, or five, or twelve. One tap.

Eight seconds is long enough to take a photograph in and short enough that the screen keeps moving. There are three settings and no slider to fiddle with: five seconds when hundreds of photos are arriving and you want everything seen, eight as standard, and twelve when you would rather people looked properly. Videos hold half again as long as photos and guest messages a little longer than a glance, so you set one number and the rest follows from it.

Changes reach a screen that is already running in about twenty seconds while photos are flowing, or up to a minute or so in a lull, so you can adjust the pace from your phone during the meal without restarting anything. Every photo gets its turn before any photo repeats, new arrivals jump the queue so a guest sees their own upload quickly, and it avoids putting the same person’s photos back to back. That last one is a preference rather than a rule: at a small event, where two or three people are sending most of the photos, you will sometimes see the same guest twice running.

The worry is always the same: what if something goes up that should not.

Hide it from your dashboard and it leaves the screen in about twenty seconds, or up to a minute or so if the screen has been quiet. It leaves the shared gallery immediately for anyone who opens or reloads that page, though a guest already looking at the gallery keeps seeing it until they refresh. The file stays in your Google Drive, because hiding is about what the room sees, not about what you keep. It costs nothing extra, which is worth saying plainly: this is the kind of thing that is often held back for a higher tier.

The screen and the shared gallery are separate things with separate links. A gallery is a page guests browse on their own phones, at their own pace, for months afterwards. A slideshow is the room. Running one does not start the other, and closing one does not close the other.

The slideshow comes with the Event Pass, at $19 once for the event, alongside unlimited uploads and the shared gallery. There is no separate add-on for it and no higher tier to reach. Several services do sell a live slideshow on top of your plan; our comparison of wedding photo apps sets out what each one charges.

Whatever runs on the screen, the photographs themselves land in your own Google Drive at full resolution, and stay there. The slideshow is a way of enjoying them on the night. It is not where they live.