Settings tab

Everything about the event that is not a photo: its details, how it looks, who else can run it, and how to stop it.

Details

Name, dates and the rest of what you set when you created it. Changing the name does not change the join link, so posters you have already printed keep working.

Link expiry

How long after the end time the event stays reachable before it closes for good. The default is 24 hours, and you can set anywhere up to a week.

This is the grace period, not the event. Guests who are still uploading when the party ends have time to finish, and someone who scans on the way out still gets in. If you want the link dead the moment the event ends, set it to the minimum.

Approve photos before guests see them

Off by default. Turn it on and nothing reaches the shared gallery until you approve it, from Waiting for you at the top of the Review tab. The Overview tab shows the count so you are not hunting for it.

Two things worth knowing:

Your photos are not held up. They go to your Drive as they are taken either way. Only what other guests can see is gated.
The guest who took a photo can still see their own. They watched it on their own camera a second earlier; hiding it back from them would fool nobody.
There is only one queue: yours. With this on, the automatic screening stops holding borderline photos aside for a second look, because you are already looking at every one of them. A shot the machine was unsure about arrives in Waiting for you with the rest, and you decide. The one thing that still never gets through is explicit content, which is blocked outright rather than handed to you.

Anything left undecided when the event ends gets a reminder email, up to three over the following week. They stop as soon as the queue is clear.

Turning it on part-way through applies to new photos only. See creating an event.

Turning it back off does not dump your queue on your guests. Whatever is still waiting goes back to the automatic screening: clean photos go live, exactly as they would have if the mode had never been on, and anything the screening flags stays hidden from guests. You are told how the split went, and the flagged ones are waiting under Hidden from guests in the Gallery tab, where Select all and Show to guests release them in one go if you disagree.

Video clips do not need this switch: every clip waits for your approval on every plan, whichever mode photos are in.

Branding

Three separate things live here.

Watermark. Applied to delivered photos. Turn it on and every photo carries it; you can still remove it from an individual photo in the Gallery tab. Watermarks want a PNG with a transparent background. A JPEG with a white box around your logo will be delivered with a white box around your logo.

Stickers. Decorations guests can put on a shot before they keep it. Optional, and they are theirs to use rather than something applied automatically.

Welcome image. The photo behind the join screen, which is the first thing a guest sees after scanning. Worth setting: it is the difference between a generic page and one that looks like your event.

Because that screen is a different shape on every phone, you also set a focal point on the image: the picker shows the whole photo, and the dot marks the part that must stay in frame however the image is cropped. Put it on the faces.

Co-organizers

Invite someone by email and they get management access to this event. The invite is good for seven days. What that access actually includes is worth reading before you send one: see co-organizers.

Danger zone

Two different actions, depending on the state of the event:

Delete event exists only for drafts. It removes the event and its join code. Nothing has happened yet, so nothing is lost.
Cancel (end) event stops all shooting on a live event. Delivered photos stay in your Drive. This one is not reversible: see ending an event.