Most event photo tools keep the photos on their own servers and give you access to them. That works until it does not: a plan lapses, a download window closes, an album hits a storage cap, or the company shuts down. The photos were never really yours, they were rented.
Papped is built the other way round. The originals go into a Google Drive you already have, in a folder with the event's name on it, at full size. You can share that folder with your partner, your photographer or your team the way you share anything else in Drive, and it stays there for as long as you want it.
It is also the answer to the search people actually make. A Google Photos QR code for a wedding is popular because couples want the photos somewhere they already own. Papped gives you that ownership without asking every guest to sign in to a Google account first.
When you connect Drive, Papped asks for the narrowest permission Google offers. It can create a folder for each event and see the files it has put there. It cannot open, list or change anything else in your Drive, including your other folders and documents.
Papped keeps no copy of your photos. The one exception is a photo the automatic screening is unsure about: it is held encrypted for at most 48 hours while you decide, then it is either delivered to your folder or deleted. Video clips are never screened by a machine; they go straight into a Pending review folder inside the event folder, and approving one moves it beside the photos and into the gallery.
Disconnecting Papped later does not touch the folder. Everything already delivered stays in your Drive, because it was always yours.
Your Drive: where photos go, in detail
A guest takes a photo, it is screened in a moment, and it appears in the shared gallery and in your Drive folder at the same time. There is no export step and nothing to download afterwards. If you have added a watermark on a paid plan, it is on the delivered photos.
Guests never see your Drive. They use the shared gallery, which opens only for people who joined through your code or link and stays open to them for 30 days after the event. The folder itself is shared with nobody until you share it.
You can delete any photo from the Gallery tab, and it is removed from your Drive as well. That is the one place Papped reaches back into the folder, and only for a file it put there.
The photos count against your own Google storage, not your guests'. Guests use none of theirs, because they never upload to their own accounts. For a small party that is a non-issue; for a large wedding or conference it is worth checking how much free space your Google account has before the day.
Every Google account starts with 15 GB of free storage shared across Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. If yours is close to full, free some space or upgrade it before the event. On Pap Pro you can also add a second Drive at setup as a backup, so a full Drive never stops photos from arriving.