Hiring a photo booth, or letting your guests upload?
You have already set money aside for a photo booth and now you are wondering whether that is the best place for it. They are two different products, and which one you want depends on what you want to be holding at the end of the night.
the short answer
A photo booth gives your guests a print in their hand, a box of silly hats, and a queue that becomes an attraction of its own. All of that works without a single phone leaving a pocket. A QR code on the table gives you the whole room all evening, including the corners where no booth is standing. For a photo booth with prints, reckon on 425 to 700 euro. If the budget is there, run them side by side.
What does a photo booth give your guest that nothing else does?
Paper. That sounds like a small thing and it is not: that strip of 5 by 15 centimetres is the only piece of your day a guest carries home the same night and sticks on the fridge. Two minutes after somebody presses the button it is lying there, with your names on it. A file does not do that, however sharp it is.
There is more in it that a QR code does not deliver. The queue is an attraction: your brother in law and your cousin's girlfriend end up waiting together and come up with something together, and that does not happen by itself at a wedding where most people have never met. The box of hats and moustaches turns somebody who would otherwise look away into a poser. And the whole thing works without phones, which at a wedding where you wanted fewer screens is exactly the point.
So what you are buying is not only a camera. You are buying a spot in the room where something happens all evening, and in the pricier packages somebody standing next to it to talk people into it.
What does a photo booth not catch?
Everything outside those two square metres. The booth stands where it stands, usually by the bar or next to the dance floor, and the rest of your evening happens somewhere else: on the terrace where the smokers are, at table seven where somebody is crying with laughter, in the corridor by the coat check at quarter past two. Nobody is standing there with a photo booth.
And it does not catch the whole day. At Spin Sensation the digital package covers three hours and the print package three to four. That is exactly the party part, and that is also all of it: getting ready, the drive to the registry office, the ceremony and the drinks fall outside it. Of the people who were there for those, every single one had a camera in their pocket.
That is the difference in one sentence. A photo booth delivers a hundred good photos from one spot. A QR code on the table delivers a few hundred photos from everywhere, some of which are nothing and some of which are the ones your photographer could not be there for. How you set that second one up is in the guide on collecting photos at your wedding.
What do you put out, and what do you end up with?
| what you put out | roughly what it costs | what you have at the end |
|---|---|---|
| Photo booth cabin or caravan | €575 to €1,089 | prints in the hand, an online gallery, and one corner where it happens |
| Photo pillar with a printer | €325 to €500 | the same, but smaller and easier to place |
| A QR code on every table | once per event, no hourly rate | everything made that day, at full size, in one album |
The amounts come from Dutch rental companies and were collected on 30 August 2026. What an event costs with us depends on your plan and is on the pricing page.
Can you do both?
Yes, and it is the right answer more often than people think. They do not cancel each other out, because they do different things: the photo booth is a place, the QR code is everywhere. For the money of a full service photo booth at 900 euro or more you can usually hire a simpler pillar and still capture the rest of the night.
In practice: put a card with the QR code next to the photo booth as well. The people in the queue are exactly the people who are in the mood to share something at that moment, and they already have their phone in their hand for a picture of the queue. Where else those cards should go is in the piece on where to put the QR code.
What you do need to know about the QR code: it asks your guest for one action the photo booth does not. Point the camera, tap, choose. That has worked on every phone without an app since roughly 2018, and whether older guests get it is a separate question with a shorter answer than you fear.
One code, no hourly rate, and no cap on guests
You set up an event, print the cards and put them out. Guests scan and upload at full size, with no app and no account. The limit is on file size rather than on a number of photos per guest, so nobody hits a wall halfway through the night.
And the slideshow on the projector?
Most photo booth companies supply an online gallery you can put on a screen. That is a gallery of the booth: what was made in the booth goes in, and nothing else. With a QR code on the table the whole room feeds the same screen, and guests tap hearts onto it from their own phones.
That makes the screen something other than a piece of scenery. People look at it to see whether their own photo is up yet, and that is exactly the nudge that produces the second and the third upload. You do not have to announce anything: the screen does the announcing.
What couples ask us
What does hiring a photo booth cost in the Netherlands?
€150 to €1,499. That is the spread across 140 suppliers on photobooths-huren.nl, with most of them between €300 and €400. A package with unlimited printing starts at around €385 for 24 hours at bruiloft-photobooth-huren.nl and €425 at photoboothhuren.com.
How many hours does a photo booth usually stay?
Three to four hours in the common packages, according to the pricing breakdown from Spin Sensation. There are exceptions: some companies offer a 24 hour hire, and Jongens van de Photobooth leaves the photo pillar in place for the whole event with no time limit.
Do guests get something in their hand with a QR code?
No, and that is the honest difference. What you can do is have the photos printed yourself afterwards, or put one old fashioned instant camera by the guest book for the paper part and catch the rest digitally.
Does a QR code also catch the people who will not pick up a phone?
No. Every wedding has a handful of guests who do not join in, and a photo booth does get them into a picture because somebody else pulls them into it. At eighty guests, not everybody gets their phone out in practice, and that is one of the reasons to do both.
What does collecting photos from guests cost?
Once per event, with no subscription and no hourly rate. The amounts are on the pricing page, and what it really costs to get everything in works it out next to a photo booth and next to disposable cameras.
Do the booth photos and the guest photos stay together?
Only if you put them together yourself. The supplier's gallery stands on its own, so ask for the original files and put those in the same album as the rest. Then you have one folder with the whole night in it instead of two halves.
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The booth by the bar, the code on every table
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