From the shutter straight to the guests' smartphones

When you're photographed at an event, you want the picture right away – not days later, when the excitement has worn off. In 2015, that was exactly the norm: memory cards were read out after the event, photos sorted and sent out later. There was no way to bring pictures live from a professional camera to the event.

PicturePartners wanted to build a business on changing that: event photos that reach guests on site – in the organiser's branding and, if desired, printed on the spot. Off-the-shelf gallery software couldn't handle live transfer, on-site printing, white-labelling for brands or guest codes that give guests personal, GDPR-compliant access to their own photos. After all, event photos show people and are therefore personal data. So we built the platform together from scratch.

Since the very first version, we have worked on the platform as a dedicated development team – and carried every turn in the business model on the technical side.

• Photomanager at the core: projects, galleries, access and QR codes for guests, downloads, votings, and branding and watermark rules per organiser – on the client's own domain if desired.
• Privacy by design: galleries are not public. Each guest reaches only their own pictures – via their personal guest code or QR code. This keeps photos and downloads GDPR-compliant without guests having to register.
• CamBox – from hardware to app: we started with a box of our own running a custom embedded Linux that transfers photos straight from the camera over Wi-Fi. Today our iOS and Android apps do the job, controlling Canon, Nikon and Sony cameras directly.
• On site and in the cloud: guest terminals, processing software that prepares photos for printing and external editing and feeds the results back automatically, plus cloud services for image sizes and download archives.
• Design and consulting: we design the interfaces for photographers, guests and organisers and advise on technology decisions – such as the move from our own hardware to a smartphone app.
• Operations from a single source: automated deployments, storage in the AWS cloud and TLS certificates for client domains that renew themselves. We also keep the platform up to date, most recently with the upgrade to Rails 8.1.

Under the ClicClic brand, the platform now turns guests into brand ambassadors: photographers are right in the middle of the action, and the pictures reach guests' smartphones by QR code while the event is still on – GDPR-compliant and ready to share.

The technology has grown with the business: from a camera box of our own to an app, from classic event photos to brand activations with ClicClic. The same team that built the first version is still developing the platform today – so closely that ClicClic's team page lists us as its software development team.