A shared gallery is great for the wedding weekend itself, but once the dust settles you want a copy of every photo on infrastructure you own — something that survives when the third-party service retires, changes pricing, or you just close the account. The cleanest way to do that for a wedding is a one-way Google Drive backup that runs automatically while guests upload.
Why back up wedding photos to Google Drive
- You own the copy. The photos sit in your personal Drive, not only inside a third-party gallery.
- Plays nicely with the tools you already use. Google Drive feeds into Google Photos, photo-book services like Shutterfly or Mixbook, and any existing desktop sync.
- Failure-proof. If the gallery service ever disappears, your full-resolution originals are already at home.
- Easy family sharing. Share a single sub-folder with parents, in-laws, or the designer building your album without exposing the whole gallery.
How the Drive backup works in Photobooth
Inside the admin dashboard a "Connect Google Drive" button runs a standard OAuth flow. You authorise Photobooth to create and write to a single folder inside your Drive. From that point on, every photo a guest uploads is synced in the background to that folder — no manual action needed.
The authorisation uses the narrowest scope Google offers (drive.file): Photobooth can only see files it has created itself in your Drive. The rest of your documents, spreadsheets, and personal photos stay invisible to the service.
What the folder structure looks like
A folder named Photobooth — [Your Event Name]is created at the root of your Drive. Inside it, one sub-folder per guest nickname. Each sub-folder holds that guest's photos under their original filenames.
The upshot: a clean tree you can hand straight to a family member, drop into an album designer, or sort by person without any extra tooling.
When to turn it on
Ideally the day you create the gallery, before guests start uploading. Every photo then gets backed up the moment it lands. If you connect Drive after the fact, trigger the "Back up everything now" action and the full history is pushed to Drive in one pass.
How much Drive storage you will need
A typical wedding produces 1,000 to 3,000 photos — roughly 2 to 10 GB. If your Drive is close to full, plan ahead: Google's free tier is 15 GB, the 100 GB plan is €1.99 / month, and the 200 GB plan is €2.99 / month. For one wedding, 100 GB is more than enough.
Duplicate handling
Photobooth does not re-upload a photo that has already been copied to Drive — a unique ID is stored after each successful transfer. If you delete a file from Drive, it will not be automatically recreated; this is a one-way backup, not a two-way mirror.
Disconnecting the backup
A "Disconnect Google Drive" button immediately revokes Photobooth's access and removes the stored refresh token. On the Google side, you can audit or revoke access at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
What to do after the wedding
Once the album is finished, the Drive copy unlocks a few moves:
- Download the whole folder to an external hard drive for long-term archival — a "cold" copy that lives offline.
- Share specific sub-folders with each guest's family so they get their own photos without the rest of the album.
- Trigger a full ZIP download from Photobooth before you retire the live gallery.
"Live gallery during the event + automatic Drive backup for the long haul" is the most resilient wedding photo setup you can get without lifting a finger. Spin up a gallery on the pricing page — Drive backup ships on the Night plan.