Free tool
Event photo storage calculator
Work out how many gigabytes your guests are about to generate — before you pick a plan, a memory card or a cloud folder.
Estimated storage
18 GB
from roughly 45 uploading guests
2,160
photos
113
min of video
57%
is video
What this estimate assumes
- 45% of guests upload anything at all.
- Each of them keeps 8 photos per hour, at 3.5 MB each.
- Each of them shoots 25 seconds of video per hour, at 90 MB per minute.
- Sizes are decimal (1 GB = 1000 MB), which is how cloud storage is billed.
Video is almost always the answer
Most people budget storage by thinking about photos, and photos are rarely the problem. A phone photo is around 3.5 MB. A minute of 4K video from the same phone is around 375 MB — over a hundred photos' worth. One guest filming three minutes of the speeches contributes more data than a hundred guests taking a photo each.
That is why the video question in the calculator swings the result more than the guest count does. If you are trying to keep an event inside a storage budget, the lever that matters is video, not how many people you invite.
Why not everyone uploads
The other number that surprises people is participation. Every guest takes photos; nowhere near every guest sends them to you. In practice, somewhere between a quarter and two-thirds of guests upload anything at all, depending on how young the crowd is, how visible the QR code was, and how much friction stands between scanning and uploading.
Anything you can do to lower that friction moves the participation number up, which is worth more than any storage optimisation. An upload page that requires no app and no account converts a great deal better than a Drive folder that asks people to sign in first — which is the whole reason EventUploader works the way it does.
How accurate is this?
It is an estimate built from averages, and real events vary widely — the assumptions panel next to the result spells out exactly what each figure is, so you can sanity-check it against what you know about your own crowd. Treat the output as an order of magnitude: it will reliably tell you whether you are looking at a few hundred megabytes or a hundred gigabytes, which is the decision you actually need to make.
If you land close to a plan boundary, size up. Running out of space mid-event is far more annoying than paying for headroom you did not use — though for what it is worth, EventUploader does not reject uploads when you hit your cap. Media past the limit is still stored, just locked until you upgrade, at which point it unlocks automatically.
Common questions
How much storage does a wedding usually need?
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A 100-guest wedding running six hours, with phones only and a few video clips, typically lands somewhere between 15 and 40 GB. Push the video setting up and it can pass 100 GB, because video dominates the total. Run your own numbers above rather than relying on a single figure.
How big is one photo?
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An iPhone photo saved as HEIC is roughly 3.5 MB at 12 megapixels; the same shot as JPG is closer to 4.5 MB. A 24-megapixel camera JPEG is around 12 MB, and RAW files from the same camera are 25 to 50 MB each.
How big is one minute of video?
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About 60 MB for 1080p at 30 fps, and about 375 MB for 4K at 30 fps, from a typical phone. This calculator uses a blended figure because guests shoot at whatever setting their phone happens to be on.
Is a gigabyte 1000 MB or 1024 MB?
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This calculator uses decimal gigabytes, where 1 GB is 1000 MB. That is how cloud storage is sold and billed, including here. Your computer's file manager may show binary gibibytes instead, which makes the same files look about 7% smaller.
What happens if my event goes over the plan's storage?
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On EventUploader, uploads keep working. Media past your plan limit is still accepted and stored, but locked — not viewable or downloadable — until you upgrade, at which point it unlocks automatically. Nothing is deleted. Uploads are only refused past 10 GB over the limit.