The mum-to-be spends the afternoon opening presents while everyone else takes the photos. Put a QR code by the cake and those photos come to one private gallery, where grandparents in another city, or another country, can see them the same day.
Free to set up, no card needed
The guest of honour is usually on the sofa under a pile of tissue paper, which means she's in every photo and has taken none. Her friends catch her face when the tiny knitted cardigan comes out, and the moment someone guesses the due date to the day. With a gallery, she gets to see all of it afterwards.
Baby showers came over from America and have settled in here as an afternoon at home, in a café or in the private room of a restaurant. It's a small crowd taking a lot of photos, and they end up split across different group chats. One gallery collects them, videos included, so the clip of everyone measuring the bump with string survives at full quality.
Showers are for close friends, but grandparents, the sister in Canada and the friend who's due next month and can't travel all want to see. Send them the private link and they can look through the photos as they arrive. The pages open in whichever of our 15 languages their phone uses, so Nani can read it in Hindi and Babcia in Polish. It's a private link, and the gallery is never on Google.
A gallery has no cut-off date: the link works for as long as it's online. So you can share it again once the baby's born and let the first visitors add their photos. It's the same gallery with the same room for 3,000; if you'd rather keep the newborn photos separate, you can start a second gallery, paid for on its own.
Most shower invites go out on WhatsApp, so add the invite message Keepcove writes for you under the date and the address. If it's a surprise, send it to a group the mum-to-be isn't in.
Stand the A5 sign next to the cake, where every guest ends up, and put an A6 card on the coffee table. If there's a TV, a laptop plugged into it can run the photo wall, which gives people something to watch between games.
Ask whoever's sitting next to the mum-to-be to photograph each present with its card as it's opened. It all goes into the gallery, and she has her thank-you list without anyone taking notes.
Send the reminder message once everyone's home. Then download the originals, and pass the link on to anyone who wasn't there.
Print the table card or put the code up on a screen. Guests point their phone camera at it and the upload page opens in the browser, so there's nothing to install and nobody has to sign up. Every photo and video lands in one gallery, exactly as the phone saved it.
Yes. The upload link works while the gallery is online, and your £39 covers a year. Share the link again with family after the birth and their photos land in the same gallery. After 12 months it renews automatically at £14.99 a year unless you cancel; if you do cancel, download everything before the paid year ends.
If there are eight of you and everyone's happy with WhatsApp copies, you may not need it. It earns its £39 when you want the full-quality originals and the videos in one place, or when family abroad want to look. Setting up is free, so you can try it with your first 10 photos and videos before you decide.
Send the invite text in a group or messages she isn't part of, and only put the QR out on the day. Keepcove never emails your guests, so nothing turns up in anyone's inbox that could give it away.
Everyone else will take them for her. The gallery takes two minutes to set up and costs nothing until you go live.
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