Photo Booth Fix: SMS sharing not arriving

What guests and the attendant see

The guest says the text never came, often a few minutes after they left the booth. Many check their main message thread and stop there, not knowing the message may be sitting in a filtered or unknown-senders folder.

The attendant sees one of three states in the app's share history: sent, queued or failed. "Sent" with no arrival points to the number or the carrier. "Queued" points to your connection. "Failed" usually means the number was rejected outright, such as a missing digit or an unsupported country.

60-second triage at the sharing station

1. Find the session in the app's share history and read the number aloud with the guest.
2. If the number is wrong, fix it and resend once.
3. If it is right and marked sent, ask the guest to check the filtered, spam or unknown-senders folder in their messaging app.
4. If it is queued, your connection is the problem; see hotspot too slow for sharing.
5. Whatever the cause, give them another route now: scan the session QR, AirDrop to an iPhone, or send by email. The line keeps moving.

Likely causes, ranked

1. Wrong number typed. Transposed digits, a missing area code, or a number typed by a friend.
2. The queue is not sending. Weak hotspot, a captive login page, or the app is offline.
3. Carrier or phone filtering. Texts from numbers the guest has never messaged, especially ones with a link, can be routed to a filtered folder or blocked.
4. The guest opted out of that sending number. If they ever replied STOP to a message from the number your app sends from, many SMS services will not deliver to them until they opt back in.
5. International numbers. Some booth apps only send to certain countries or need the country code entered.

The full fix, step by step

1. Test the system, not the guest. Send a share to your own phone. If yours does not arrive within a minute, the problem is the queue or the provider, not the number.
2. If your test fails, check the connection, then your booth app's status or support page for an SMS outage. Switch your share pitch to QR and email until it recovers.
3. If your test arrives but a guest's does not, confirm the number, resend once, and ask them to search their messages for your event name.
4. Do not resend over and over. Repeated identical texts to one number can look like spam to carriers. One resend, then switch methods.
5. Clean up the message text in your event settings during a lull: short, with the event name, one link, no extra links and no all caps.
6. For international guests, enter the full number with country code, or send by email or QR if your app does not support that country.
7. Note every failed number so you can make sure those guests get the gallery link through the host after the event.

Prevent it next event

• At T-7, write the SMS text when you build the event: a short message naming the event and your business, with a single link.
• At T-2, test to two phones on two different carriers. One arriving is not proof the other will.
• At setup, send a test SMS along with QR, email and AirDrop, and confirm it lands.
• Make the number field easy. Turn on the app's number formatting or country code option if it has one, and coach guests: "Double-check your number on the screen before you tap send."
• Handle guest numbers properly. Use them only to deliver images, as your image release and privacy policy should state.

When to switch to another sharing method

If SMS is failing for more than one guest and your own test text does not arrive within 2 minutes, stop offering text for now. Make QR the main method, push AirDrop for iPhones, keep email as the type-in option, and point everyone at the gallery QR sign.

Texts marked queued rather than failed should go out once the connection recovers, so tell guests that plainly. If texts show as sent but nobody receives them, contact your booth app's support after the event and log it in your post-event report with the time and the carriers involved.