How Momentshare stores your event photos securely in the EU

When guests upload photos and videos to your event, they trust you (and us) with personal memories. Under the GDPR, photos with recognisable people are personal data. So "where are my photos stored, and who can access them?" is exactly the right question to ask any photo-sharing platform. Here's our answer, in plain language.

Your photos and videos never leave the EU

All media uploaded to Momentshare is hosted in Germany. Photos and videos are stored with Hetzner, a German hosting provider, and our database runs in Frankfurt. Media files and database content are stored exclusively within the European Union. That's not a marketing phrase; it's a commitment we put in writing, in our data processing agreement.

Why does it matter? Data stored in the EU is covered by European privacy law from end to end. Your guests' photos aren't transferred to servers outside the EU, so you never have to explain to a privacy-conscious guest, or to your company's legal department, which foreign laws might apply to their photos.

This expectation is becoming the norm. In a 2025 survey by European cybersecurity firm HarfangLab, 54% of IT security decision-makers in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium said data sovereignty is now a priority in purchasing decisions. Momentshare is built for exactly that expectation.

We collect as little as possible

The best protection for data is not having it in the first place. Momentshare stores personal details of one person only: the event owner. That's your name, e-mail address and billing details: what we need to run your event and send you an invoice.

About your guests, we deliberately store nothing that identifies them:

• No accounts: guests scan the QR code and upload. No sign-up, no e-mail address, no phone number.
• No IP addresses or device data: we don't store technical identifiers of guests or users.
• No tracking or profiling: uploads are linked to your event through a technical session key that contains no personal data and can't be traced back to a person.

The photos and videos themselves can of course show recognisable people. That's why we treat every uploaded file as personal data under the GDPR, with all the protection that implies, even though we don't know who uploaded it.

How we protect your media

A few of the measures that are contractually part of our service:

• Encrypted transport: every connection to the platform runs over encrypted HTTPS.
• A shielded media environment: your photos and videos are only reachable through your event's unique link or QR code. There's no public index of events or media.
• Strict access control: access to production systems is limited to authorised people on a least-privilege basis and protected with strong authentication.
• Hashed passwords: account passwords are stored only as one-way hashes. We can't read them, and neither can anyone else.
• Monitoring without your media: we monitor the platform continuously, and our error logging never contains media files.

One honest note about QR codes. Your event link is shareable by design: that's what makes uploading effortless for guests. Treat it like a paper invitation: give it to the people you want at your event. And if you ever want to close the doors, you can unpublish your event at any moment; from then on your media is no longer accessible to others.

You stay in control of every photo

Your event, your data. Under the GDPR we act strictly as a processor: we process photos and videos only to run your event, never for our own purposes.

• Deletion is real: after your event's storage period (or earlier, on your instruction) we delete the owner data and all uploaded photos and videos. You can also remove individual photos or videos whenever you want.
• Right to be forgotten: if a guest asks for photos of themselves to be removed, we support you in handling that request, including deletion.
• No secondary use: our licence to your content reaches exactly as far as needed to store, process and display it within your event. We never use your photos for promotion or anything else.
• If something ever goes wrong: we report a personal data breach to you without undue delay, including what happened, what's affected and which measures we're taking.

For companies, agencies and municipalities

Professional events come with procurement questions, rightly so. Three things are useful to know.

A signed DPA is available. Article 28 of the GDPR requires a data processing agreement between you and any party that processes personal data for you. We have a standard DPA ready to sign. It covers our processor role, the security measures, retention and deletion, sub-processors and the breach procedure described above. Public-sector organisations, including Dutch municipalities, already use Momentshare under this agreement.

Our sub-processor list is short and transparent. Media hosting and database services stay within the EU (Germany). For transactional e-mail to event owners and for error monitoring we use two established providers under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. Neither ever receives your media files. The full list, with registration numbers and activities, is an annex to the DPA.

Your media lives in ISO 27001-certified data centers. Our hosting provider Hetzner is certified to ISO 27001, the international standard for information security management. On top of that infrastructure we apply our own security practice: data minimisation, least-privilege access and encryption in transport. Need specific security documentation? Ask us. That's a conversation we like having.

Questions? Ask them

Security claims are easy to make and hard to verify. That's why we prefer to put ours in writing: in a DPA you can sign, an EU data-residency commitment and a transparent sub-processor list. Want to receive those documents, or more detail for your legal team? Get in touch via the contact page. Rather see the platform first? Try the free demo. It runs on exactly the same EU infrastructure as every paid event.