It is something wedding photographers should offer. I've seen wedding photographers expand the traditional model and set up Purikura so people can take their own group photos:
Pro photographers are ideally equipped for some the tough problems in wedding photography (the reception dinner that is poorly lit, large group photos, etc.) but there is going to be a lot of value in gathering and curating guest photos in 2023 and who's in a better place to do it?
The wedding photographer better be able to add an additional line item for services you are requesting. I have worked on site specifically for allowing group events to allow attendees to share their images directly from their phones. A QR code was provided that took them directly to the event's site. These images were available along with the professional photographers' images.
It is A LOT of work. You're specifically talking about an event with everyone's mom gathered together. The tech support for a site like this based on the users being targeted is a total nightmare. The simplest tasks are confounding to people. UI/UX definitely has a lot of heavy lifting to do here. This may or may not be the wedding photog's skillset.
The wedding photog has enough on their plate to deal with. I personally would not want them to be asked to provide tech support to tech illiterate family/friends of bridezilla.
Exactly, the wedding photographer ought to set you up with a "white label" version of the above web sites or just pick one out and set it up for you. I wouldn't expect them to code it up any more than I'd expect them to build a custom camera. On the other hand it ought to be part of the service because it is something they can do in a few minutes without thinking about it while the organizers could struggle with it.
(Kinda funny that my photographer friends online tend to automatically discount any software I've developed myself for image processing; a lot of them still think sRGB is the "standard" color space in 2023 despite mobile devices mostly being Display P3 for some time)
I wasn't suggesting they code their own site up. I only mentioned my involvement to suggest I had some familiarity.
I've been at these events where attendees are actively asking people for assistance. My nightmare fuel was people actively seeking out the photog during the event for that assistance. Asking the photog to be tech support for this is not something that should be on their list of duties. The photog could possibly provide suggestions for the couple to use, and put the burden on them.
Anecdotal perspective: As a user, I hate these third-party services because they can't make use of the built-in features of photo sharing apps that Google and Apple already make. You have to go through some pain in the ass individual (or bulk select) upload process, deal with a long-running thread in your browser (which may be interrupted and may or may not gracefully resume), etc.
vs like in Google Photos, you just hold-select a bunch of photos you already took (and probably auto-synced to the cloud), add them to the shared album... and done! No additional friction and no re-uploading needed.
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That said, I don't know if that's a common enough workflow for your average non-HN, non-power-user =/ It's possible people don't even know that feature exists.
It is A LOT of work. You're specifically talking about an event with everyone's mom gathered together. The tech support for a site like this based on the users being targeted is a total nightmare. The simplest tasks are confounding to people. UI/UX definitely has a lot of heavy lifting to do here. This may or may not be the wedding photog's skillset.
The wedding photog has enough on their plate to deal with. I personally would not want them to be asked to provide tech support to tech illiterate family/friends of bridezilla.