Your Photo Booth Handbook

Overview#

Boothy turns an ordinary PC into a fully featured photo booth. Guests operate it themselves on the touchscreen – from the shutter through editing to the print or download. As the operator you set the event up once and keep full control through the admin area, without ever interrupting what is running on screen.

Boothy consists of three building blocks. Only the first one is required – everything else you add when you need it.

Languages

Boothy speaks German, English, French, Spanish and Italian. Importantly, the admin language is independent of the guest language. You can hand the booth to a French-speaking wedding party and keep configuring it in your own language. Guests switch languages themselves through a dedicated button on the start screen.

System Requirements#

Boothy is modest with resources and runs happily on older hardware. For a relaxed event – especially with a DSLR and a printer attached – a little headroom still pays off.

Supported cameras

Boothy detects connected cameras at startup and prefers a DSLR when one is present. Otherwise it falls back to the webcam. In the admin area you can pin a specific camera instead.

Installation#

Boothy installs through a setup wizard and the whole thing takes just a few minutes. Windows additionally offers a portable build that writes nothing into the system – handy for rental booths that get reimaged regularly.

Getting Started#

On first launch a wizard walks you through the basics. Everything you set there can be changed later in the admin area – the wizard only saves you the cold start.

License & Terms#

Boothy has exactly one license – and it always contains the complete feature set. The only thing you choose is the term, never the scope. There are no add-on packages, no feature unlocks and no tiers: every active license unlocks 100 % of everything.

Try before you buy

Without a license Boothy runs in a limited mode: 10 captures in total and at most 50 prints per event. On top of that you can start a trial in the license area that unlocks every feature – again capped at 10 captures. That lets you run the entire experience including AI, gamification and cloud before you commit.

Activating and moving a license

The license area always shows status, purchased term, license holder, expiry date and how many activations your key already uses. To move to a different booth, remove the license on the old machine first and activate it on the new one afterwards.

Admin Area#

The admin area is your control centre. You can reach it at any time without leaving kiosk mode – your guests will not notice a thing.

Access and protection

Tap the top-left corner of the screen five times in quick succession. The gesture is invisible to guests and will not fire by accident. Then enter your admin password.

The areas at a glance

Event & Design#

Under "Session" you define what the booth is being used for right now and how it looks while doing it.

Usage window

You can give the booth a fixed time window. Before the start it shows a waiting screen with a countdown, and after the end time it switches to the closing screen automatically. Leave the fields empty and the booth is always active. Useful when you build up the day before, or when you want to make sure nobody keeps printing after the official end.

Screensaver

When nothing happens for a while, Boothy gently fades into a screensaver: a carousel of the event photos, optionally with a logo or a video clip in the centre. You set the idle time in minutes, five by default. On request the screensaver also shows a discreet gear icon that gets you into the admin area faster.

Capture#

Boothy knows three ways to capture. You decide which of them are offered on the start screen.

What you can tune

Photo booth without a touchscreen

For booths with only a physical shutter button and no reachable touchscreen there is a dedicated mode. Boothy then hides every control – the start screen keeps only the title and subtitle, and the review screen shows nothing but the photo.

Editing Photos#

After the shutter, guests land on the review screen where they can refine their picture before it is printed or shared. Which tools are available is up to you in the Features area.

Photo filters

Twelve classic looks, applied instantly and without any internet connection:

AI image editing

On request guests can send their photo through an AI style transfer – the group shot becomes an oil painting, a cartoon or a cyberpunk scene. Boothy ships fourteen ready-made styles, among them 90s Cartoon, Van Gogh, Oil Painting, Cyberpunk, Simpsons, Lo-Fi Vaporwave, 8-Bit, Film Look, Superhero, Halloween and a plain background removal.

Stickers and props

Guests drag stickers such as glasses, hats or speech bubbles onto their photo, move them with a finger, scale them with two fingers and rotate them freely. Your own stickers go into the sticker folder of the installation as PNGs with a transparent background – they then show up in the picker automatically.

Interactive stickers

Beyond the fixed images there are stickers Boothy renders live, each in several designs. They can be enabled independently of the regular sticker library:

Signature

Guests can write or draw directly onto the photo with a finger – for congratulations, names or a short message. You set the default pen colour.

Templates#

A template defines what the finished picture looks like: how many individual shots are taken, how they are arranged and what sits around them. Every photo is placed into that layout automatically – guests do not have to do anything for it.

The editor

You build templates in a drag-and-drop editor. Either start from scratch or reach for the bundled template gallery and adapt a finished design.

Formats and photo strips

When creating a template you choose between the standard format (10×15) and the photo strip (5×15). Boothy prints strips as two 2×6 pieces on one 4×6 sheet – one for the guest book, one for the guests. To have the printer cut the sheet in the middle by itself, set the cut up once in the Printing area.

Printing#

Boothy prints on any installed printer. For event use, dye-sublimation printers from DNP or Citizen are the natural choice – they are fast, smudge-proof and deliver consistent quality over hundreds of prints.

Cutting photo strips automatically

DNP and Citizen printers can cut a 4×6 sheet in the middle themselves. On Windows a wizard guides you through the one-time setup in three steps: the driver dialog opens twice, once with the cut enabled for strips and once without it for ordinary photos. Boothy then sends the matching profile with every job – strips and single photos can alternate freely without touching the driver. On macOS and Linux this happens automatically as long as the driver offers the cut. With no cut configured, Boothy prints a thin white centre line for cutting by hand.

Keeping an eye on the ribbon

On DNP and Citizen printers Boothy reads the remaining prints straight from the device. When the counter drops below your warning threshold – 200 by default – the printer tile and the pre-event checkup point it out. You can also have an e-mail sent to you once a given number of prints is reached. That saves you from standing there mid-celebration with no media left.

Sharing Photos#

There are four ways for guests to get their photos, and you can combine them freely.

QR code

After every capture a QR code appears. Guests scan it and have their photo on their phone – no app, no account, no e-mail address. The QR code works in one of two modes, and exactly one of them is active at a time:

E-mail

Guests type in their address at the booth and receive the photo by mail. Delivery runs entirely through the Boothy Cloud – you do not have to set up a mail server or store any credentials. The download link inside is valid for seven days. The accompanying text is yours to write.

Cloud sync into your own storage

Boothy uploads every photo into your own cloud storage right after the capture. Three providers are available and may run at the same time. Photos land in a folder following the pattern "event name and date". If the booth happens to be offline, uploads move into a queue and are caught up automatically once the connection returns.

Saving locally

Independently of everything else, Boothy writes every photo to the hard disk. That is your safety net: even if network, cloud and printer all fail, every image is there at the end of the night.

Boothy Beam#

Boothy Beam is the phone side of your event. The booth runs a small web server for it – guests scan the QR code and they are in. No app, no registration, no internet required; a shared Wi-Fi is enough.

On the network the booth additionally announces itself as boothy.local, so it can be reached without a QR code as well. The port it uses can be changed if it happens to be taken.

What guests can do with it

Gallery and privacy

Not every event is comfortable with all guests leafing through every photo. That is why the two galleries can be switched off separately:

Gamification#

Gamification turns the photo booth into a competition. Guests sign up with a name, complete photo challenges, collect points and compare themselves on the leaderboard. The effect is noticeable: the booth gets used all evening instead of just for the first hour.

Challenges

A challenge is a photo task with a point value – something like "a photo with the newlyweds" or "the best group selfie". You can write your own or reach for ready-made sets sorted by occasion: wedding, birthday, coming-of-age, Christmas, company party and family.

Pose challenges with image recognition

Pose challenges are a special case. Boothy shows a pose – heart, disco, muscles, star or a toast – and uses the body posture in the picture to tell whether the guests actually hit it. The analysis happens entirely on the device; nothing is sent to a server.

Management and privacy

Customization#

Boothy should not look like Boothy but like your event or your brand. Practically every visible text, colour and sound can be adjusted.

Live editor

Instead of hunting for settings you can work directly in the picture. The live editor takes you to the start screen, the capture screen or the photo review and highlights everything that can be changed there. Tap a text, rewrite it – changes are saved immediately.

Arranging the start screen freely

In the "move fields" mode the title, subtitle, capture buttons and navigation icons start to wobble gently and can be dragged anywhere. The capture buttons can additionally be resized with two fingers or the corner handle. All positions are stored relative to the screen size and therefore stay correct at any resolution and in both orientations. The top-left corner is deliberately locked – that is where the admin area hides.

Hardware & Image#

This is where you tell Boothy how to deal with your camera and your physical setup.

Trigger with an extra hardware button

A physical button on the housing fires the shot – common arcade buttons sit behind a USB encoder that registers as a keyboard and sends a keystroke on every press. That keystroke is what you teach Boothy here. The setting is independent of the touchscreen: both may run side by side, guests tap and you press.

Close the photo review automatically

After a capture the finished photo stays on screen until somebody taps a button. With nobody standing in front of it, the next guests find their predecessors' picture instead of the start screen. Switch it on and set the seconds (5 to 600, default 60) – then the booth goes back by itself. Switched off, nothing changes.

Paid Mode#

In paid mode the photo booth becomes a vending machine: guests pay per photo before the shutter fires. Made for funfairs, trade shows and public locations where the booth is meant to earn its own keep. With the mode active the usual buttons disappear from the start screen and are replaced by the payment options.

Ways to pay

Both routes can be offered at the same time. Guests then pick how to pay once they have chosen their product.

Products and prices

Boothy Cloud#

Boothy Cloud is your dashboard on boothy.eu. You sign in with the e-mail address you bought the license with – that is the only way booths and photos get attributed to your account.

Transferring configuration

The booth never fetches its configuration on its own. You start the sync in the admin area, first see a preview with event name, modification date and included templates – and only then decide whether to import. Session settings, features, sharing, printing, texts, e-mail, audio and templates come across. Hardware and network settings deliberately stay local, because they belong to the device rather than to the event.

Cloud gallery

With the cloud gallery enabled, photos move into your event gallery automatically. You can also upload afterwards: Boothy lists every event folder on the booth, you tick what should go up and start the upload. Failed uploads can be retried on their own.

Analytics & Report#

The analytics page is your overview during the event. It shows at a glance whether camera, printer, QR code and AI are ready to go – and names the concrete problem instead of just reporting one.

Pre-event checkup

Before the event you work through a checklist. You put it together yourself and mark each item as required, recommended or optional. If you want, the booth can be set to start only once the required items are ticked – the best protection against the classic "forgot to switch the camera on".

Next to your own items there are ready-made tests Boothy runs itself: a camera check through the live preview, a shutter check with a real test photo, a print check with test pages in both formats, a Beam check for the phone, and a check for whether an admin password is set at all.

Statistics

Boothy counts everything that matters, per event: photos, videos, boomerangs and prints over time, captures per hour, the busiest phase, the longest lull, QR codes shown, views and downloads of the Beam gallery, likes given, the most popular filter, stickers placed, signatures, e-mails sent, AI images, phone uploads and camera reconnects. The numbers survive app restarts.

Event report and highlight video

At the end Boothy produces two things you can hand to your clients. The event report presents the numbers graphically, as PDF, JPEG or both, and in the language of your choice. The highlight video edits an intro carrying the event name in the booth design, graphical statistics slides and every photo into one film – with your own music underneath if you like.

Updates & Data#

On request Boothy checks for new versions itself and installs them straight from the admin area – downloading, installing and restarting run without further input.

Photos and data

All captures sit on the hard disk as ordinary files, sorted by event, so you can copy or back them up yourself at any time. The admin area offers two cleanup functions: "Delete photos" removes only the images, while "Factory reset" also resets settings, templates and game data. The license survives both.

When something is off

Under "Help & Support" you reach the support team straight from the app, submit feature requests and send your error logs with a single click. Those logs contain no photos and no personal data. By default Boothy reports serious errors automatically in the background so crashes reach us even when you have no time for it mid-event. That automatic reporting can be switched off at any time.

Help & FAQ#

The questions that come up most often in day-to-day event work – and what actually helps.

Support

Did not find your answer? Drop us a line and we will get back to you as soon as we can. Straight from the booth you can reach us under Admin area → Help & Support.