Why we built Booth: every guest’s phone is already a photobooth

Every party has the same problem. Everyone takes photos, and nobody ever sees them. They live in a hundred camera rolls and a group chat that goes quiet by Monday. If there’s a rented photobooth, it’s a box in the corner with a line, a prop bin and prints that end up on the floor.

We built Booth because the camera that could fix this is already in every guest’s pocket. It just needed a room to share.

The problem with the party photo

A classic photobooth works because it does three things well. It gives you a format, like the three-frame strip. It gives you a moment, the countdown and the flash. And it gives you something to take home. Phones beat booths at image quality and lose at everything else. Party photos end up scattered, unedited and private by default.

We wanted the ritual of the booth with the reach of the phone. The host shouldn’t need to rent hardware, and the guests shouldn’t need to install anything complicated or make an account just to join in.

One code, the whole room

A Booth event starts with the host. You design the event, then go live on a six-digit code, shared as a QR code that opens straight into the event through a Universal Link. Guests scan, and they’re in. You can schedule when the event goes live and keep editing it in real time while it runs.

Everything guests shoot lands in one shared roll, so the photos end up in one place for everyone instead of forty camera rolls.

Formats worth printing

Booth is built around formats instead of a plain camera:

• Classic three-photo strips, the shape everyone recognises from the real thing.
• Quad postcards, when you want four frames and room for a message.
• Cinematic layouts, for wide frames and more drama.
• Video cards, 3-second clips in four styles: Together, Border, Spotlight and Lift.

Behind the shutter are 14 film cameras and pro editing tools, so a phone photo can have the grain and colour of a disposable, a point-and-shoot or a studio strip.

The Creative Lab

Hosts care what the event looks like. The Creative Lab is where you design it. It has a Liquid Glass interface, free-form layouts, washi tape and doodles. It also integrates with Luma, so an event you’re already running there can carry straight into Booth.

A wall, with a bouncer

A live photo wall is the best part of a party photobooth, and the riskiest. So Booth’s event wall has a host approval queue, and content filtering runs on the device. Nothing reaches the screen until the host lets it through. When the night’s over, hosts can bulk-download the whole roll.

Privacy was a design rule, not an afterthought. Event content gets a secure purge 24 hours after the event, so the party doesn’t live on a server forever.

Where it’s gone since

Booth 1.0 launched on the App Store on July 20. Version 1.1 followed on September 15. It added a camera dial for switching between film looks, a filter lab, cross-device sync and notifications from the event wall. Booth runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS 17 or later, on Apple silicon Macs and on Apple Vision Pro, and it’s free.

Every star travels with an entourage. Booth is the one holding the camera.

Why it’s part of ONTOURAGE

ONTOURAGE is a suite of apps that each do one job very well and turn up where the night happens. Booth’s job is the party. It gets the whole room into one roll and gives everyone something worth keeping.