What makes a good photo booth frame
A frame is the one part of the booth every guest's friends will see. A good one makes the photo look better than it did without it, and says where it was taken. Here is what to ask your designer for.
Start from the photo
The photo is the point; the frame is around it. Keep the window large - most of the picture - and keep the busy artwork at the edges, where it will not cover a face.
Faces sit in the top half of most photos. Leave the top of the window clear of flowers, garlands and logos, and put the heaviest decoration along the bottom.
The window
The window must be see-through: a PNG with a transparent hole where the photo goes. A window painted white, black or as a grey checkerboard is the most common mistake - the photo cannot show through paint.
If one arrives painted, the console finds the window and cuts it out for you, including a checkerboard painted into the picture. Ask for a transparent PNG anyway: it saves the border's last pixels.
Ask for the file as a document, not a photo. WhatsApp turns every photo it sends into a JPEG, and a JPEG cannot be transparent at all.
Both shapes
Guests choose portrait or landscape before they choose a frame, so make one of each. Portrait suits one person or a family; landscape suits a group, a stage or a skyline.
- Portrait: 1440 × 1800 pixels.
- Landscape: 1800 × 1440 pixels.
- PNG with a transparent window, or WebP.
A frame is not a poster turned sideways: move the words and the artwork for each shape, so neither crowds the window.
The words on it
Put the event's name and year on the frame, big enough to read on a phone in a WhatsApp chat. A photo shared without them is a nice photo; with them it is an invitation.
Keep it to a few words. The caption carries the rest - the hashtags, the blessing, the thank-you - and guests can edit that before they share; they cannot edit the frame.
If a sponsor is paying, their logo belongs on the frame, where it is in every photo. See getting a sponsor to pay for it.
How many
Two or three of each shape is plenty. More choice slows people down, and Analytics shows afterwards which frames were picked and which were actually shared - the best guide for next time.
Try it before the day
Upload the frames in the console. It shows each with a sample photo inside, through the same drawing the booth uses, so what you see is what guests get.
Then open the event's private preview link on your own phone and take a real photo in every frame. Look at it on the small screen, in the light of the venue if you can.