Get your photobooth photos into your live wedding gallery (via Google Drive)

Most modern photobooths — whether a hired setup or a DIY iPad booth — export their images to cloud storage, and Google Drive is one of the most common destinations. That's great for ownership, but the files just sit in a Drive folder. They're not in whatever gallery your guests are watching on the screen, and they're not in the slideshow.

Meanwhile the phone photos your guests snap go wherever your collection tool puts them. With a closed platform, that's the vendor's servers — and there's no way to merge an outside folder in. This is the quiet advantage of a Drive-based tool: the booth's folder and your gallery are on the same side of the wall.

In your PixBearer dashboard gallery, there's an Import button with two ways in. The fastest is 'Import a whole folder': point your booth's export at your event's Drive folder (or a subfolder inside it), briefly set that folder to 'Anyone with the link – Viewer', and PixBearer pulls in every photo — subfolders included — in one tap. It works on any device or browser, and the app walks you through switching the folder back to Restricted as soon as the thumbnails finish (it reminds you, and shows you exactly when it's safe).

The second way is 'Pick specific files', which opens Google's own file picker so you can choose photos or videos from anywhere in your Drive, file by file. The picker needs a browser that allows Google's cookies, so it's most reliable in Chrome or Edge on a computer — which is also why the whole-folder option exists.

Either way, nothing is copied or moved in your Drive; the files stay exactly where the booth put them. You're just telling the gallery to include them — they appear in your live guest gallery and big-screen slideshow next to the phone uploads within seconds, thumbnails and all.

Photos and videos are supported — JPEG, PNG, HEIC, MP4, MOV and the usual formats — up to 500 MB per file. That covers essentially every photobooth still and boomerang clip. Whole-folder import brings in photos; videos come in through 'Pick specific files' (or by uploading them directly like a guest would).

A couple of sensible limits: RAW camera files are skipped (they can't be previewed in a browser gallery — export JPEGs instead), and anything that isn't a photo or video (a PDF print template, a settings file the booth dropped in the folder) is ignored automatically. You get a quick summary of what came in and what was skipped.

Import from Drive is part of the Premium plan, alongside the live gallery and slideshow it feeds — a one-time $39 upgrade, no subscription.

During the reception, your slideshow becomes the whole night instead of half of it: phone candids and polished booth strips cycling on the same screen. Guests see themselves and keep the energy going.

After the wedding, there's no reconciling two exports. Everything — booth and phones — is already together in your Google Drive, at original quality, yours forever with no hosting expiry. If you're still choosing a collection tool, our comparison pages walk through why Drive ownership matters, and how to collect wedding photos from guests covers the phone-upload side.