Birthday party photos that aren't forty near-identical selfies

Open your camera roll the day after a birthday party. You will find the cake from four angles, six versions of the same group shot where somebody blinked, and a video of the candles filmed from too far away.

What you will not find is the hour before anyone arrived, the person who laughed so hard they had to sit down, or what the room looked like at one in the morning.

Why this happens

Phones removed every constraint that used to make party photos good. Unlimited shots means nobody chooses. Instant preview means everyone takes the same photo four times chasing a better one. And because anyone can shoot anything, no one feels responsible for shooting anything in particular.

The result is a lot of photographs of the two or three obvious set pieces, and nothing at all of the party itself.

Four things that fix it

None of these require anyone to be good at photography.

• Give people a limited number of shots. Ten frames turns every guest into an editor. They stop firing at the cake and start waiting for something.

• Start before the guests do. The setup hour — balloons half-inflated, someone taping something to a wall — is consistently better than anything staged later.

• Hand the camera around. The birthday person is in nobody's photos if they're the one taking them, and guests photograph each other far more naturally than a host does.

• Shoot the leaving. The goodbyes at the door, the last four people on a sofa, the wreckage of the table. Nobody thinks to take these and everybody wants them later.

And put them in one place

The other half of the problem is that good party photos get stranded. They sit on the phone of the friend who took them, get posted once to a story that expires, and disappear.

If everyone's shots land in a single album, a birthday stops being your version of the night and becomes everybody's — which, given that you spent the evening being hugged by people and missing most of what happened, is a considerably better record of it.