Digital invitation: how many Halloween photos can you add?

It's Friday, half past six, and your neighbour is parking the car with one hand and holding her phone with the other. She opens the link you sent, sees the carved pumpkin on your garage door and already knows what she's doing on Saturday. That's the whole job of a digital invitation: one web page, one link, nothing to install. You choose a design from the catalogue, add your own text and photos in the browser and publish it the same night, without printing anything.

So the practical question comes first: how many photos can you add to a digital Halloween invitation? Six. Not six per scene, not six plus a cover. Six of your own pictures, one of them marked as the cover and the rest doing the decorating. That's the budget, and it's more than you think.

Six photos per digital invitation, and that's the ceiling

Your album has forty pictures of the garage. The invitation takes six, so the folder stays on your phone. Each photo sits in its own frame and gets cropped for you, which means the crooked cobweb in the corner doesn't need fixing by hand. Pick by scene before you upload anything, and pick the scenes you'd actually tell someone about: the portal, the table, the sign on the door.

• The garage door with the pumpkin lit, on the side where the light looks warm rather than orange.
• The table: candles, dark cloth, the bowl of sweets you'll end up refilling twice.
• The detail that says it's your party: the hand-painted sign, the bats cut out by whoever was free that afternoon.
• One from last year, if you're repeating the party, so the neighbours can find themselves in it.

How to choose the cover of your Halloween digital invitations

The cover is what fills the screen the second the link opens. In a decorated garage, the portal with pumpkins and warm light usually wins: it's the shot your neighbour looks at while she's still holding the car keys. You decide which photo is the cover, and you can change that decision on Friday afternoon, when the last garland is up and the fake spiders have found their place.

What gets heavy isn't the file, it's your neighbour's patience. The invitation is a web page, not a PDF and not a giant image: it opens in the browser from a link, a QR code or a message, with no app for anyone. Six chosen photos get looked at. Twenty get scrolled past. Picture the neighbour from the third floor holding a bag of sweets in one hand, tapping the link with the other. Nothing to download, nothing to accept, no "what do I press now".

Six photos people actually look at beat twenty they scroll past on the way to the address.

Edit after sending: the link stays the same

Nothing is frozen once you've sent it. Swap the photo of the garage for the one of the decorated living room and the same link shows the new version, with no second message in the group chat. Move the doorbell to eleven, fix a house number, add the dress code or the route around the corner: everyone who opens the link from then on sees the updated text. Confirmations land inside the invitation in one list, so you're not counting thumbs-up emojis at midnight.

That leaves you with a plan you can do tonight. Pick six photos, mark the one with the lit pumpkin as the cover, and write the time and the address in the last scene people see before they reply. It costs 29.99 EUR in one payment, there's nothing to print, no envelopes and no app for your guests. Six photos, one link, and the garage is already telling the story before the doorbell rings.