If you’ve already gotten comfortable with the basics from Raspberry Pi for beginners, a DIY photobooth is one of the most fun, genuinely useful projects you can build next. Instead of blinking an LED, you end up with a real, self-hosted photobooth that could run at an actual birthday party, wedding, or company event.

A Raspberry Pi DIY photobooth is a self-hosted photobooth application that captures photos at events, applies decorative themes, and displays them in real time on a second screen for guests to enjoy. It’s built specifically with the Raspberry Pi and its camera module in mind, but it also runs on any computer with a webcam — so you can build and test it on a laptop before deploying it to a Pi for the actual event.

This guide walks through what this photobooth project actually does, the hardware and software it needs, how to set it up, and a few tips for running it smoothly on event day.

What Is a Raspberry Pi DIY Photobooth?

This particular project (available on GitHub) is a self-hosted photobooth web application built with Python and Flask. Guests can see a live camera preview, trigger a countdown, and get a themed photo — all through a browser-based interface, with results displayed live on a secondary screen for everyone at the event to see.

Key Features

The project packs in a genuinely impressive set of features for a DIY build:

  • Live camera preview streamed to the browser via MJPEG
  • Countdown capture with a 3-second timer before each photo
  • Background replacement, using either a green screen or AI-powered background removal (rembg)
  • Photo frame themes, including polaroid, birthday, and vintage styles
  • Event management, organizing separate photobooth sessions with their own private gallery links
  • Cloud or local storage, saving photos locally or uploading them to Cloudflare R2
  • A live show display — a full-screen, auto-cycling scrapbook grid that updates with new photos as they’re taken
  • QR code generation, so guests can instantly pull up the event gallery on their own phones
  • An admin panel for browser-based configuration, no command line required once it’s running

What You’ll Need

Hardware

  • A Raspberry Pi with a camera module — the primary, intended setup for event use.
  • A webcam or laptop camera — works fine for development and testing before deploying to the Pi.
  • An optional momentary push button, wired to GPIO pin 17, for a satisfying physical “press to take a photo” experience instead of clicking a screen.

Software

  • Python 3.11 or higher
  • Flask, the web framework the app is built on
  • uv, used as the project’s package manager — if you’re not familiar with it yet, this uv guide covers the basics
  • picamera2, for native Raspberry Pi camera support
  • OpenCV (cv2), as a webcam fallback for non-Pi development
  • rembg, for AI-powered background removal
  • SQLite, used to associate photos with specific events

How to Set Up the Photobooth

  1. Clone the repository from GitHub onto your Raspberry Pi or development machine.
  2. Install uv if you haven’t already, following the official installation steps.
  3. Sync the project’s dependencies with uv sync, which installs Flask, OpenCV, rembg, and everything else the project needs.
  4. Connect your camera — the Pi camera module for a real deployment, or a webcam for local testing.
  5. Run the application using uv run, then open the app in a browser on the same network to see the live camera preview.
  6. Wire up the optional GPIO button on pin 17 if you want a physical capture trigger instead of clicking through the browser.

Check the project’s own README on GitHub for the exact run command and any configuration specific to your setup — hardware and camera options can vary slightly between a Raspberry Pi and a standard webcam.

Event Day Tips

A few things make the photobooth experience noticeably smoother when it’s actually running at an event:

  • Use the GPIO button for a more tactile, arcade-like experience — guests press a real button instead of tapping a touchscreen.
  • Display the live show grid on a second screen or TV. The auto-cycling scrapbook layout keeps the energy up by showing new photos as they come in.
  • Generate a QR code per event so guests can pull up their photos instantly on their own phones without asking anyone for a link.
  • Test your lighting and background setup ahead of time, especially if you’re using the green screen or AI background removal — both work best with consistent, even lighting.
  • Decide on storage in advance. Local storage is simpler for a one-off event, while Cloudflare R2 makes sense if you want photos accessible after the event ends.

Conclusion

A Raspberry Pi DIY photobooth turns a small single-board computer into a genuinely fun, fully self-hosted event photobooth — complete with live preview, themed photo frames, background removal, and a live slideshow display, all running on hardware that costs a fraction of renting a commercial photobooth.

Whether you’re building this for your own event or as a hands-on Raspberry Pi project to sharpen your Python and Flask skills, the photobooth project on GitHub gives you a complete, real-world application to learn from — camera handling, a Flask web interface, GPIO input, and cloud storage, all in one build. Start with a webcam on your laptop to get familiar with the app, then move it over to a Raspberry Pi once you’re ready to bring it to a real event.