Wedding Photo Booths Spain | Wedding ideas & Festive Props

Wedding photo booths are a great opportunity to memorialise your epic event with fun moments for young and old…

If you are looking to add more entertainment for your guests, photo booths, apart from being ideal to capture some amusing moments at your reception and provide a small memento for your guests to take home with them to remember your special day, are also one of the best ways to break the ice and get your guests to have fun and interact with each other.

Today, Sunshine Weddings Spain chats with Gavin, founder of Go Fotomaton, a photo booth rental in Marbella, Malaga and across the Costa del Sol, and find out a bit more about why a photo booth is a must if you want to provide original and quirky entertainment for your guests!

Hi Gavin, tell us a bit more about yourself and how GO Fotomaton started?

Just over 10 years ago I went to a relatives wedding in Texas where they had a homemade photo booth. I saw that it was great fun and was a hit with all age groups. At the time I was living in my hometown, Belfast, working with several wedding businesses, helping them build websites etc. Out of curiosity, I did some research and soon realised  there weren’t many wedding services that rented out photo booths. So I decided to set up my own business offering photo booth rentals at weekends or in my spare time. It quickly caught on!

After a couple of years my wife and I decided to move to Spain and together, we set up Go Fotomaton.

We were one of the first companies doing photo booths in Spain. It took a little longer to catch on here but soon they were as popular as ever at weddings and other events.

Which is the most popular request for weddings, the photo booth (open or closed), giant light up letters or flipbook?

Over the years we’ve invested in new products such as the open style photo booth, a magic mirror, giant light up letters, our flipbook studio and most recently the smart printer.

The smart printer and flipbook studio have both been popular in corporate events. In fact we are one of the very few companies that offer the flipbook and have done events in Lisbon & Madrid for high end designer brands.

But most people aren’t sure what it is so we haven’t had that many requests for it at weddings. But basically a flipbook is a short seven second video printed out in 40 frames and made into a little book which plays the video back when flipped.

The process of printing and binding the book takes less than 2 minutes and we can average about 40 books per hour, making a unique and personal gift for the wedding guests.

The smart printer is our latest addition, this allows guests to upload photos they have taken with their smartphone to our printer where it’s printed out on the spot, with a customised design and message on top.

To use this printer, guests need to upload their photos using a qr code, funnily enough, pre covid, very few people knew what a qr code was, now you can’t go out for dinner without scanning one!

Despite all these new products our photo booths remain the most popular. Nowadays they have more features like beauty filters, Gifs and boomerangs but essentially they are the same and allow people a few minutes of silliness and fun while providing memories that last for a very long time – normally stuck on a fridge or as a bookmark somewhere!

Tell me a bit more about the wedding magic mirror, what exactly is it?

The Magic mirror was made famous a few years ago when it appeared on First Dates. Essentially it’s a photo booth behind a big 5 ft mirror. The mirror, as well as being a mirror, displays animations telling people to touch the screen and when to strike a pose. Once finished it prints out the photos with a nice design and message such as the date and names of the bride and groom.

Our photo booth assistant is always on hand to help guests, not that they normally need it, and to create a guest album for the bride and groom full of photos and messages from the guests.

We also provide a prop box with signs, hats, glasses and other items for guests to try on should they wish!

After the event guests can see all the photo booth photos and gifs via the gallery on our website. But don’t worry it’s password protected so only guests with the password can access them!

How far in advance should a bridal couple look to book your services?

We will always try our best to accommodate bookings whenever they are made, even at a few days notice. However some dates and some photo booths can be more popular than others, especially weekends around the summer months. For this reason we always suggest booking our services in advance, ideally a year in advance, but we do have some bookings much further in advance than that!

On average, how long are you at a wedding? And when do you set up, during the cocktail hour or after the wedding breakfast?

This really depends on the service. For example the giant light up letters are always set up in advance. The photo booths are usually set up while the wedding breakfast is taking place, ready to start during the open bar and after the first dance.

We recommend having  the photo booth for 3 hrs on average, a little less if it’s a smaller wedding.

We normally set up the smart printer before the wedding  and let people know where it is and how to use it, that way the guests are free to use it throughout the day and into the night.

The flipbook is usually more popular during the cocktail hour and this allows us to print and prepare the flip books during the dinner ready for guests to collect after.

We often suggest combining our flipbook and photo booth packages, with one set up during the cocktail hour and the other during the evening entertainment, so there is always an alternative form of entertainment available.

Any funny anecdotes from a wedding?

Well lots but I probably shouldn’t share them! However, there is one interesting story which I can tell that took place about five years ago. We were contacted by an event planner, who we had worked with before, from Madrid. She requested our closed photo booth with just a few days’ notice. Normally we’d have been happy to help but we were fully booked that weekend with weddings and events around Marbella and Gibraltar.

The busy season, together with the additional six hour drive to Madrid meant we just couldn’t make it work and unfortunately had to turn down the event.

We later found out that the event was for Real Madrid and the likes of Christiano Ronaldo had been in the photo booth. I still kick myself for missing that one!

We did make up for it a few years later though, when we rented out one of our photo booths for the cast party of Game of Thrones in Belfast.

Thanks Gavin, for sharing with us the story behind Go Fotomaton. We hope to see you and your photo booths very soon at future weddings.

Go Fotomaton—a quirky entertainment option wedding guests love—can provide both open and closed photo booths, with various backdrops to choose from, personalised printouts, prop box, digital copies and much, much more.