Out of the box, the QR code on your booth serves photos from the booth computer itself. That works, and it costs nothing, but it has a catch most operators only discover after an event: the guest has to be on the venue’s wi-fi, and the moment you switch the booth off, every link you handed out that night stops working.
Turning on cloud storage fixes that. Photos go to storage you own, links keep working for months, and you can check on the booth from your phone. It takes about ten minutes, almost all of it on Cloudflare’s website rather than in VertexBooth.
What you need
- An email address to make a free Cloudflare account.
- A payment card. Cloudflare asks for one to switch on their storage product even though the first 10 GB stays free forever. This surprises people, so it is worth knowing before you start.
- About ten minutes.
Why bother
It is not only about links lasting. Four things in VertexBooth only work once this is on: photo links that outlive the event, the monitor page that lets you check the booth from your phone, the microsite, and the whole-event gallery. If you have ever wondered why the monitor page shows nothing, this is usually the reason.
1. Open the page and see the five steps
In Studio, under Booth, choose Cloud. Across the top you will see the five stages: make a Cloudflare account, make a bucket, get a token and keys, test, and switch on. The page tracks where you are, so you can stop halfway and come back.
2. Make the storage bucket
A bucket is just a folder that lives on the internet rather than on your computer. On Cloudflare’s site, create an R2 bucket and give it a name you will recognize later, such as your booth’s name.
3. Create a token scoped to that one bucket
A token is a long password that lets VertexBooth write into that folder and nothing else. When Cloudflare asks what the token may do, choose Object Read and Write, and point it at the single bucket you just made rather than your whole account.
Why that matters: if the token ever leaked, a narrow one can only touch photos in that one bucket. A broad one could touch everything in your account. It costs you nothing to choose the narrow option.
4. Paste the four values into VertexBooth
Back in Studio, fill in Account ID, Bucket name, Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, then the Public address Cloudflare gives you for the bucket. Click Test connection.
The test writes one tiny file and reads it back. It changes nothing else, so you can run it as many times as you like.
5. Turn the master switch on
Check Send photos and status to the cloud. Until you do, nothing is uploaded no matter how many keys you have pasted in. This is the step people miss.
6. Decide what gets sent and for how long
Under What to send, each box is a thing that leaves the booth. Anything you leave unchecked is simply never uploaded rather than uploaded and hidden, so leaving guests’ phone numbers and email addresses unchecked means they never go anywhere.
Keep photos for sets how long the bucket holds on to a session before deleting it by itself. Ninety days is a reasonable starting point. Setting it to zero means forever, which also means your storage bill grows forever.
Upload can be limited to times when the booth is sitting idle, which keeps uploads from competing with the camera while a guest is mid-session. On a modest booth computer that is the kinder choice.
What it costs
At typical settings a session is roughly 11 MB. Cloudflare’s free 10 GB holds around 930 sessions, so with a 90 day keep rule you stay free until you are averaging more than about 310 sessions a month. Past that it is cents per gigabyte. The figures inside VertexBooth are estimates written at the time and can lag reality, so treat Cloudflare’s own billing page as the number that counts.
Common questions
I already set this up on another booth. Do I do it all again?
No. The Cloud page has a Copy it from there option that pulls the settings across from another profile on the same machine.
Is VertexBooth holding my photos?
No. The account and the storage are yours, and you could close the booth software tomorrow and still have every file. There is no subscription in the middle.