How many photos do wedding guests actually take?

Every guest at your wedding is carrying a camera, and most of them will use it. The question isn't how many photos get taken — it's how many you ever see.

The one number worth knowing

In 2018 The Knot published figures from its own photo-sharing app comparing two ways of collecting guest photos. Couples using the app received an average of 870 photos and videos per wedding from their guests. A wedding hashtag on Instagram, by contrast, averaged 22 photos uploaded by guests.

Both figures come from The Knot's own press release, October 2018. The Knot, October 2018

Treat that as directional rather than gospel — it's vendor data, it's several years old, and the company publishing it was selling the app that won. But the shape of it matches what couples report, and the gap is far too large to be explained by measurement error. Guests are not taking forty times more photos when there's an app. They're taking roughly the same number and sharing far more of them.

Why a hashtag loses so much

A hashtag asks a guest to do four things in a row, and each one loses people:

• Have an Instagram account at all.
• Remember the hashtag, hours after reading it once.
• Type it correctly.
• Have a public account, or you'll never see the post.

Multiply four leaky steps together and 22 stops being surprising. It isn't that your guests didn't care — it's that you asked them to complete a form from memory at a party.

Where the other photos are

They're on people's phones. They stay there. Six months later they're buried under a holiday and someone's newborn, and the friend who took the best photo of your first dance genuinely forgot it existed. Nobody withheld anything; the moment to send it just passed.

What changes the number

Reduce the request to one step that happens while the guest is standing still. A QR code on the table is that: point the camera, a page opens, add a photo. No account, no app to install, nothing to remember later. Grandparents can do it, which is the actual test.

We're new enough that we don't have our own numbers yet, and we'd rather say so than borrow someone else's and imply they're ours. When we have enough weddings for an average to mean anything, we'll publish it here — including if it's less flattering than the figures above.