Pooja Mehta Weddings tested SpotMe on nine nights of garba

Pooja shoots weddings from November to February and events the rest of the year: engagements, baby showers, and Navratri, which in Ahmedabad is its own season.

She had looked at face-matching apps before and didn’t trust them. Her worry was specific. Indian weddings are full of people dressed alike, in similar colours, under strong coloured light. If an app sent a guest the wrong photos, or missed half of theirs, the couple would hear about it, and so would she.

Her old delivery was a Drive link per function and a pen drive for the couple. Guests at weddings rarely found their own photos. At garba events she didn’t even try. A society Navratri can have 2,000 people over nine nights, and nobody was going to scroll through that.

“I wanted to break it before I sold it to a couple. Garba felt like the hardest test I could give it.”

She chose her own housing society’s Navratri: nine nights, around 11,000 photos, coloured stage lights, everyone in chaniya cholis and kediyus, lots of motion.

Her first decision was structure. She considered one event per night, then settled on one event with nine folders, Night 1 to Night 9, so people who came on several nights only took one selfie. She uploaded each night’s photos the next morning, then clicked Find faces once on the full set after the last night.

The friction was on the guest side. A few older residents opened the link in the society WhatsApp group and stalled at the camera permission. Pooja added one line to her message (“tap Allow when it asks for the camera”) and the questions stopped.

She also learned to tell people to take the selfie somewhere bright. A guest who retook a dim selfie under a tube light found photos the first attempt had missed.

Out of the guests who used it, one person told her a photo was missing. That was enough for Pooja.

She moved all her weddings onto SpotMe that winter and has delivered 19 since. Couples get the master link with each function in its own folder, and she shows prospective clients the Navratri gallery on her phone because it is the hardest example she has.

The garba test turned into business too. Three families from the society booked her for weddings after seeing their own photos, with her watermark, on each other’s statuses.

She keeps both Navratri and wedding events on the Pro plan. When a season ends and couples have their photos, she deletes the older events and the space comes back.

“The accuracy I was worried about turned out to be the thing I talk about most. Nobody believes garba photos can be matched until they see their own.”