Guest photo - are the apps worth it?

Personally, I don't think they would be worth it. I know that as a guest I wouldn't download an app simply to share photos from a wedding. I do think that hashtags are the easiest route for guests to share photos that can be seen by the couple. I'm sorry I don't have any alternate solutions for you.

That's kind of how I felt too I don't know if I would either if I was a guest, I appreciate your feedback though!

We did nothing - no hashtag, no app, none of it. And we still managed to get almost everyone's photos without even having to ask. If people post to Facebook or Instagram regularly and would think to use a #, most likely they'd thing to tag you as well. At least that was the case for us. (And anyone who didn't use social media ended up emailing/texting them to me anyway)

I know as a guest I most likely would not download an app to share photos. We didn't do a hashtag but we had plenty of people post photos to Facebook so we didn't miss out or anything.

I don't think that any of my guests would download an app. I was planning to really encourage people to use our hashtag if they are going to post photos (using a sign or two at the reception), and I was going to do an I Spy card of different picture ideas on the tables and set up an email address for guests to send photos to that night, or the next day when they're in the hotel or traveling home. I figured most people have an email and can attach and send them easily.

I used The Guest for our wedding...it was free to set up, so no big deal. We put info about it on our website, and in the hotel welcome bags. Maybe 10 people used it, we got just under 250 pictures. But I was happy with it overall...we were able to see pictures the next day, which is nice because we aren't due to get the files from the photographer for a few more weeks. Some blurry stuff, but some group pictures that I doubt the photographer would have gotten. We don't Instagram, so I didn't bother with a hashtag, and my friends didn't post a ton of stuff to FB.

We used The Guest app and didn’t have a hashtag. We had 11 people (out of 64) use it. We got 500+ pictures and videos, some of them are duplicate where someone else saved the picture and it loaded twice.
I enjoyed having it. It was fun to see on the drive over our guests enjoying cocktail hr. It also gave me pictures of the day since we didn’t get a sneak peak until a week after. We wouldn’t have gotten as many had we just expected people to post them and tag us. Many of our guests didn’t post pictures, I think just my SILs did.
I would 100% recommend it. I’m thinking about using it again for my graduation in a few weeks.

Thank you for the comments ladies, I appreciate the feedback from the both a guest's perepective and from people who have actually used the app

From my experience asking guests to download an app to share their photos didn't work out too well. One of my friends also had a similar problem so we built letspotluck.com just for this purpose - collecting photos/videos from your guests. The idea is guests don't have to create accounts or download apps to share their photos with you. You can print QR cards for the wedding day and/or also provide a web link for your guests to upload photos.

I tried the app and set up a test event... my friend downloaded the app and put random purse pics to see how it would work... it's a neat idea for tech savvy and people w folks that mostly all use that technology.... they create a login and find your event (it's easier to send the invite link ahead of time)... the date and time set up is kind of confusing because if u go in too early or late, you cant post. The upside is that you choose whether to keep or delete without everyone else seeing them 1st and has a nice download in bulk with options of wifi only... might be easier than using a Facebook group and saves the quality of the pic taken. I had some pics come out blurry when posted to Facebook that were clear on my phone.