Photo Booths: A Renter's Guide

At many events, I may come in contact with one or two people who ask a lot about our business and about photo booths in general and honestly, it’s one of my favorite questions to answer. There’s a lot of information about photo booths and the photo booth market in general that can still be convoluted. Although we’re creating a thorough renter’s guide for any potential clients doing their research on photo booths, I’ve decided to write a truncated version of this guide with detailed information about the photo booth market.

First, you may be asking how and why photo booths are becoming so popular, particularly in the wedding and entertainment industry. Photo booths, at the foundation of what they provide, are a nostalgic phenomenon that invokes a child-like feeling. People staggering out of a photo booth smiling and laughing while holding their printed photo strips makes everyone else want to join in on the fun! Even if the future of photo booths isn’t set in stone, they’re a great way to make memories that last a life time.

In general, three main factors when selecting a photo booth are customization, portability, and the build and support of the booth. You want to be able to have the freedom and creativity to have exactly what you want for your photo booth rental, so you should be looking for a company that can work with you on what you want and is flexible in any packages that they might offer. You also want to have a photo booth that is portable and doesn’t take a long time to load in or set up. Delivery, load-in, set-up, and break down should be close to flawless. Finally, you want a set-up that is sleek yet sturdy should your attendant not be present while the photo booth is in service. If anyone else who hasn’t been trained to set-up and operate the booth has to do so, you want to have a seamless setup so as to not have it malfunction, collapse, or be rendered useless because no one knew how to operate it.

Other factors that you may want to look into are style of photo booth, pricing of any packages and extra add-on features, styles of cameras and printers, etc. There are mainly two styles of photo booths—enclosed and open air. Enclosed is the more traditional style, like what you would see in movie theaters and malls. An open air booth is a modern take on the classic photo booth. It’s usually smaller in build and allows for more people to take a picture. (At Pixster, we can fit between 15-20 guests in the open air photo booth).

As far as pricing is concerned, the national average for photo booth rentals is anywhere around $480-$500. But according to WeddingWire, most brides seem to be spending $800-$1200 for a wedding photo booth rental. You may also want to look into what types and methods of payment companies use. There are also different types of cameras and printers that companies use such as a DSLR camera or a point-and-shoot camera and a dye-sub printer compared to an inkjet printer.

There’s a lot of information when it comes to renting photo booths, some that you may not even considered important to think about. This is just a shortened version of a very thorough guide to renting photo booths. Make sure you keep an eye out for our renter’s guide, though! It’ll be chock full of all the information you could ever need for renting a photo booth!