Most event hosts tend to treat their photos as a short-term chore immediately during and after their event: they have to upload their photo gallery, send a recap or thank you to attendees, and move on. The images then disappear into a hard drive folder or an online storage (Flickr, Google) until next year's event when the process repeats.
Recently, my iPhone presented me with several pictures of my family that we took on a family vacation months ago through its "Memories" feature, and I was struck with a moment of nostalgia. Similarly, I argue that well-selected event photos represent a huge missed opportunity for positive engagement among event operators. After all, these photos are tied to real moments people were part of, and can be one of the most natural ways to reconnect and stay top-of-mind long after an event has concluded.
Why event photos get underused
Returning to my "Memories" example, it's worth noting that in order to actually evoke positive feelings using photos, the photos must be: (A) small in number, and (B) personalized to actually include the person in question.
In other words, dropping a link to a Flickr or Google Photos gallery containing thousands of images that may or may not contain the person you want to reconnect with is not good enough. Rather, you need to find 5 or fewer high-quality photos containing the person in question, for every single person who attended your event. Managing this kind of process and schedule in Dropbox, Google Drive, SmugMug, Pixieset, or a hard drive is impossible -- after all, these tools were built for storage, not person-based retrieval.
How to unlock personalized photo retrieval
To solve this problem, event teams should consider utilizing tools like Portraiteer that automatically organize all of their event photos (past, present, and future) by people/attendee. This is done entirely automatically, using consent-aware AI photo processing and tagging, and scales to thousands of photos of thousands of guests across multiple years of history. By being able to automatically surface and search for photos of each person across an event host's history, Portraiteer can help you transform your event photos from a one-time chore into a durable, reusable relationship asset. In this way, your entire archive of images becomes immediately useful for follow-up, retention, and future campaign work.
Want event photos to stay useful long after the recap email?
If your team keeps uploading galleries and then forgetting them, Portraiteer can help you build engagement throughout the year.