Separate employee galleries and public company highlights

One celebration produces two kinds of photographs. Some are warm, spontaneous and meant for the people who were there. Others are tidy, approved and suitable for a website, a recruitment page or a press note. Treating them as one pile creates avoidable problems.

This page belongs to our guide to company celebration and awards photography. It helps you define two useful selections before the event, so each reaches the right audience.

What is the difference between the two sets?

	Employee gallery	Public highlights
Audience	Attendees, sometimes wider staff	Website, social, press, recruitment
Size	Broad, many images	Small, selective
Tone	Relaxed, candid	Polished, representative
Approval	Light, usually by the organiser	Formal, by a named person
Access	Private link or controlled folder	Published by the company
Risk if wrong	Awkward moments seen by colleagues	Public exposure of people or information

The point is not to hide anything. It is to make sure each photograph goes where its subject would reasonably expect.

Who is each set for?

Start with the audience. The employee gallery is a keepsake: it should include candid table moments, colleagues together, and the awards with enough variety that most attendees find themselves. Table photographs or reception mingling at an annual dinner explores how to gather such images.

Public highlights are chosen to show the culture and the milestone to someone outside. Our guide on photographs for company websites and annual reports lists the kinds of images that tend to be used, and different image packs for media, sponsors and internal teams helps you separate audiences.

How do you select the public set?

Agree criteria before anyone starts looking at images. Useful questions include:

• Does the image show the milestone or the programme clearly?
• Are the people in it comfortable being shown outside the company?
• Does any screen, badge or document in the image reveal something internal?
• Is the image representative of the people who attended?
• Has the named approver seen it?

Our team can propose a shortlist, but the approver decides. Internal results on screens during a celebration shows one common reason an otherwise good image should stay inside.

What about consent and notice?

Employees do not automatically agree to public use by attending. Malaysia's personal data law, the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 as amended, sets rules about notice and consent for personal data, and the Department's guidance describes notices. We cannot interpret the law for your company.

Ask a qualified adviser what notice, consent or policy your organisation needs for public use, and keep that separate from venue rules and the photographer's terms, which are different things. Our guide on personal, internal, press and advertising uses of photographs shows how uses differ, and the photo sharing and privacy plan helps you write down the answers.

A hypothetical example

Imagine a 180-person company celebration. The organiser sets up a private gallery for attendees and appoints a communications officer to approve public images. The public set is capped at twenty images for the website and recruitment page.

Before the event, the HR team tells guests that photographs will be taken, that they will go to an employee gallery, and that a small number may be used publicly. Two staff members ask not to appear in public images. The photographer is told at the briefing, and the editor excludes those frames from the shortlist.

How is each set delivered and stored?

Decide where each set lives. A private gallery with a link works for most employee sets, but check access, expiry and who can download. Public images are usually delivered to the approver in the sizes and crops the company needs, as described in portrait, landscape and alternative crops from an event.

Make sure the employee gallery does not include images that were held back from the public set for a reason, such as restricted slides. Organizing dinner photographs by awards, tables and departments explains how structure keeps material apart.

How is it recorded?

Keep a short record of which images are approved for which use. The image-use and approval register is a simple way to do this, and it helps new team members who inherit the archive later. The post-event image use planner helps you plan the uses before delivery.

What to tell the photographer

• The audience and size of the employee gallery.
• The channels, formats and number of public images.
• Who approves public images and how quickly.
• Any guests or groups who should not appear in public images.
• How removal requests will be handled.

We record these choices in the quotation and in the delivery notes.