In March 2020, the events industry changed forever. More specifically, the COVID-19 pandemic forced wedding to change drastically and pushed many couples to get creative in their wedding planning.
From micro-weddings in the backyard to virtual weddings over Zoom, we witnessed great creativity as saw just about every kind of wedding plan you could imagine. But couples looking to get married weren’t the only ones getting creative. The pandemic also pushed many companies to build new technologies and products that have now lasted long after restrictions ended.
One of the best examples of this is the virtual photo booth, which was first invented by Snapbar. When it was launched during the summer of 2020, the virtual photo booth was simply an online photo booth that allowed guests to snap a selfie and start customizing the photo with stickers, frames and backgrounds of their choice. The resulting images would be shared to social or simply used by the event hosts as keepsakes.
Many weddings that did pivot to a virtual ceremony and reception used virtual photo booths as simple engagement tools. Something to keep people entertained and create memories with.
But what about today? Now that weddings are happening in-person and in huge numbers, has the virtual photo booth for weddings died?
Not at all!
While they’re obviously not as popular as the ‘real thing’, virtual photo booths at weddings have taken on a life of their own, used more for digital wedding guest books than anything else.
Virtual photo booths are like mini photo booths in every wedding guests’ pocket. While the real photo booth is a blast, many people don’t use them. In contrast, a virtual photo booth can be accessed from any mobile device which is helpful when many guests at weddings can’t seem to put their phones down.
You can also automatically collect the pictures from guests and couples alike and use them for wedding photo book design inspiration. That special day deserves to be remembered and a virtual photo booth brings everyone's experiences together beyond just the wedding day itself.
By using and printing from a free QR code generator, guests can access the virtual photo booth directly from their table - turning guests into roaming wedding photographers. OK…they don’t actually replace photographers, but they DO help document a hundred smaller, more personal moments from among the crowd.
With Snapshot, Snapbar’s leading virtual photo booth product, guests are able to take selfies, pictures of their friends, or of the cake, or dancing and so on, and then caption each image and share it to a slideshow.
That slideshow can be used at the wedding itself as a real-time digital wedding guestbook, and also helps create another inclusive and fun guest activity!
