Admin guide
Sign in at /admin with your account: admin and the password from ADMIN_PASSWORD on a fresh install, or the one an owner gave you. The admin works on a phone, but it's most comfortable on a laptop.
Dashboard
Totals across every event: photos, guests who sent at least one photo, page views, downloads, storage used and photos waiting for approval. Below: uploads per day over the last 30 days, the five most active photographers, and the latest events.
Events
New event asks for a name and nothing else; every other setting has a default you can change later. Each event has its tabs: Photos, Guestbook (once you turn it on), Stats, QR & sharing and Settings.
Photos
The contact sheet of everything guests sent, newest first.
- Filter by All, Pending, Visible, Hidden or Favorites, and by challenge when the event has some.
- Tap photos to select them, then Approve, Hide, Favorite, Unfavorite or Delete from the bar at the bottom. Hidden photos disappear for the guest who took them too, and leave the live wall; deleted photos are removed from disk.
- Download ZIP gets every visible photo at full resolution, named
0001-camille-1a2b3c4d.jpgso they sort in the order they were taken. The archive streams, so even a multi-gigabyte album starts downloading immediately. - Import photos adds files from your computer, typically the photographer's: sent one by one at full quality (no compression in the browser), published at once, outside guest quotas and closing times, and credited to the name you give.
- Favorites are your picks, marked with a star. Under the Favorites filter, Download the favorites gets a "best of" ZIP, and a gallery link can show the favorites only. Guests never see which photos you picked.
Guestbook
Turn it on in Settings → Guestbook: guests then find a card under their photos to leave a few words, a voice note of up to 2 minutes recorded in the browser, or both. Messages follow the event's moderation, like photos; a guest sees and can delete only their own.
The Guestbook tab lists them with a player for each voice note. Select to approve, hide or delete; Download the guestbook gets a ZIP with guestbook.txt (every message, oldest first) and the voice notes, numbered to match. Show the messages behind gallery links adds the approved ones under the photos of every gallery link of the event (off by default: they were written for you). The end-of-event summary counts them.
Stats
Uploads per hour over the event (a party lasts a night, so hours are the useful unit), page views, downloads, wrong access codes, top photographers, and photos per challenge.
QR & sharing
Guest link: the address behind the QR code, to paste in a message.
QR code design: presets, colors, dot and corner shapes, margin, a logo in the middle and a caption. The preview is the exact file you download, as PNG (512 to 4096 px) or SVG. Remember to Save before downloading.
Printable poster: an A4 card with the event name, date and QR code.
Slideshow video: an MP4 of the visible photos (or the favorites) in the order they were taken, with a title card, slow zooms and crossfades, 16:9 or 9:16 for stories, 2 to 8 seconds per photo, up to 300 photos, and your own music if you add a file (cut and faded out at the end). It is made in your browser (WebCodecs, any recent Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox), so the server needs no video encoder: keep the tab open while the progress bar runs. Photos far from the video's shape are shown whole on a blurred backdrop instead of being cropped.
Live wall: a full-screen slideshow for a projector or a TV. New photos jump the queue and appear within five seconds; in between, it cycles through the latest ones. Only visible photos are shown, so with Approve each photo first nothing reaches the screen until you approve it. Its settings:
Setting What it does Layout One print at a time, a mosaic (the newest big, four around it) or a grid of fifteen Seconds per step 3 to 30 Show who took each photo / the challenge Captions under each photo Show the QR code in a corner So the room keeps joining Favorites only Only the photos you starred Show guestbook messages Approved text messages: between photos in One print, along the bottom otherwise An open wall picks up setting changes within 20 seconds, no reload needed.
Generate a new link: changes the address. The old QR code stops working at once, for everyone. Use it if the code leaked.
Settings
| Section | Setting | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Event | Name, welcome message, date, accent color | What guests see at the top of their page. The color tints the camera and the buttons; the text on it adjusts automatically. |
| Access | Access code | Optional, 6+ characters. Guests type it once. Leave empty to let the QR code alone grant access. |
| Uploads | Accept uploads | Turn uploads off at any time; guests keep their own photos. |
| Close uploads automatically at | For example the morning after. | |
| Capture mode | Camera only (the default), library only, or both. | |
| Photos per guest | 0 for no limit. Guests see a counter of photos left. | |
| Moderation | Publish immediately and hide later, or approve each photo first. | |
| Guests | Album language | Automatic (each guest's phone) or one fixed language. Guests can still switch. |
| Ask guests for their name | Shown next to their photos in the admin and on the live wall. | |
| Look | Frame | Instant print (white border, event name and date below, logo), Event color (a border in the accent color with the name), or Logo stamp in a corner. Drawn on the phone before sending. |
| Let guests pick a filter | Black & white, warm, vintage or vivid, chosen above the shutter. Frames and filters are part of the photo sent: the original isn't kept. Phones that can't decode a format in the browser (rare) send it plain. | |
| Challenges | List of prompts | Up to 30 photo ideas ("The dance floor", "The couple with a stranger"). Guests pick one above the shutter and see which ones they already did. Renaming a challenge keeps its photos; removing it keeps them too, untagged in the filter. |
| After the event | Let guests leave their email to get the album | Adds a card on the guest page. Opt-in; addresses are deleted with the event. | | | Email me a summary when uploads close | Photos, photographers, views, what's still pending. | | | Email guests a gallery link when uploads close | One password-protected link for the event, sent to every address once. | | | Link valid for (days) | 0 for a link that never expires. | | | Guests can download the photos from the link | Off: the link shows photos but not originals or the ZIP. | | | Only send the favorites | The link shows the photos you starred instead of the whole album. Star them before the event ends. | | | Put the password in the email | Off: guests get the link only, and the password reaches you (summary email and the End the event card) so you can pass it on yourself. A forwarded email then isn't enough. |
Gallery links
In QR & sharing, Gallery links creates private links to the visible photos of the event: for family who weren't there, or for guests afterwards. Each link has its own password (yours, or a generated one shown once), an optional expiry, a downloads switch, the whole album or the favorites only, and a view counter. Revoke cuts it off at once, even for someone who already opened it. A gallery link never lets anyone upload, and never shows pending or hidden photos.
End the event
Uploads end on their own at the scheduled closing time; the end-of-event emails then go out within a minute. End the event now does it immediately. It runs once per event: ending again does nothing.
Duplicate this event (owners): a new event with the same settings, colors, QR code design, logo, challenges and organizers, ready for next year. No photos, messages or links come along, and it gets its own QR code: the old one keeps pointing at the old event.
Danger zone: deleting an event removes every photo from disk. Type the event name to confirm.
Settings
Settings are split into five areas, listed on the left (a row of tabs on a phone). An area that needs your attention says so in the list: two-step verification off, no automatic backups, no email server, an update waiting. Organizers only see Your account.
Your account
- Profile: display name and the address where your events' summaries and alerts go.
- Password: changing it signs out your other sessions. Not available for the account set by
ADMIN_PASSWORD: change the variable and restart instead. - Two-step verification: scan the QR code with an authenticator app, type the code, and keep the ten recovery codes shown once. Every sign-in then asks for a code after the password. Lost your phone? Sign in with a recovery code, or ask an owner to reset it from Team.
- Language and theme for your own browser.
Team (owners)
Add people and pick their role.
| Role | Can |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything: every event, creating and deleting events, accounts, email, alerts |
| Organizer | Only the events assigned to them: photos and moderation, settings, QR code, gallery links, live wall, ending the event. Not deleting it. |
A new account gets a generated password, shown once for you to pass on. New password generates another one and signs the person out; Delete ends their access at once. The last owner can't be demoted or deleted.
Notifications (owners)
Email: SMTP server (or read-only when set by
SMTP_HOST), where alerts go, and a Send a test email button that shows the server's answer.Alerts, each switchable: photos waiting for approval (at most every 30 minutes, only when the count grows), an event's end summary, 10+ wrong admin passwords within 15 minutes (at most hourly), disk 90% full (at most daily).
Recent emails with their state. Failed ones can be retried.
Webhooks: the same alerts on your phone or in a chat, whatever the email settings. Up to 10, each with its own choice of alerts (event ended, photos waiting, new guestbook message, failed sign-ins, storage).
Service URL What arrives ntfy a topic on ntfy.sh or your own server A push notification that opens the admin page Discord channel settings → Integrations → Webhooks An embed (mentions disabled) Slack an Incoming Webhook A message with a link JSON anything: Home Assistant, n8n, your script { app, kind, title, message, url, event, data, sentAt }, signed withX-Guestroll-Signature: sha256=<HMAC of the body>when you set a secretTest sends a notice right away and shows the service's answer. Real alerts go through a queue retried like emails (1, 5, 15 minutes, 1 and 6 hours); the last deliveries are listed under the webhooks.
Data (owners)
- Backup: download a backup of everything (see Deployment).
- Automatic backups: every night, every 6 hours, weekly, or any cron expression, to a folder or an S3 bucket with the newest N kept, each listed with download and restore buttons. Back up now runs one at once.
- Restore a backup file.
- Delete ended events: with a number of days (14 or more), an event is deleted that long after it ended, photos and messages included; its hosts get an email a week before, and the date shows on the event's QR & sharing tab. Events that never ended (no closing time, never ended by hand) are kept.
System (owners)
- Updates: the version you run, the newest one with its release notes, Check now, and, with the updater container, Update to X.Y.Z: a backup, the new image, a health check, the old one back if anything goes wrong. The history lists every update and the database migrations it applied. A line under the navigation tells owners when a version is out.
- About: version, default language, photo storage, largest photo accepted, public address and time zone of the instance.
Event emails (summaries, photos waiting for approval) go to the instance address in Email and to every account managing the event that set an address. Instance alerts (failed sign-ins, disk) go to the owners.