Every surprise, every poem.
Kept, not just remembered.
This page is for the parent who organises pakjesavond, and for the Dutch or Flemish family living abroad who does it in a house where nobody else on the street knows why there are shoes by the fireplace. The season runs from the intocht in November, through the weeks of a carrot in the shoe and pepernoten scattered on the floor in the morning, to the evening of the fifth of December itself: the loud knock, the sack of presents on the doorstep, and then the part that matters, each surprise unwrapped and each gedicht read out loud to laughter and groans. In Belgium the children find it all on the morning of the sixth instead. Either way the photos and the poems end up on a dozen phones and in a family app that shrinks them, and oma and opa in Groningen or Ghent see none of it. One QR code fixes that.
One-time. No account needed to buy — about a minute.
The moments guests actually photograph at Sinterklaas evenings
Why Sinterklaas evenings work better on Picsui
Written for the person hosting this one, and checked against what the product actually does.
The poems, in the voice that read them
A gedicht is written to be performed, and the performance is the part nobody keeps. Guests record it as a voice note of up to 60 seconds straight into the gallery, so the uncle's rhyme about the teenager's driving lesson survives in his own delivery, groans included, alongside the photo of the surprise it came with.
Oma and opa at the table from another country
Dutch families abroad celebrate pakjesavond at a strange hour for the grandparents back home. Live Broadcast puts the living room on a private link with audio, so they hear the knock at the door, see the children run to the sack, and listen to every poem as it is read, in the same evening instead of a summary weeks later.
A written guestbook for the poems nobody wants to lose
Turn on the written guestbook with a prompt, and everyone types or pastes their gedicht before the evening starts. The poems sit next to the photos of the surprises they belong to, so next year, when somebody argues about who wrote the best one, the evidence is in the gallery and not in a bin bag with the wrapping paper.
No app. No account. One scan.
Guests point their camera at a QR code and are uploading in seconds. Nobody installs anything, nobody creates a login, and the grandparents can do it as easily as the teenagers.
unlimited photo and video uploads
Every guest can send as much as they like: phone photos, iPhone HEICs, short videos, up to a fair-use bound of 25 GB per event. Originals are kept at full resolution.
Voice messages
Guests record up to 60 seconds of audio right from the upload page: a blessing, a toast, a story. It is saved next to the photos in the same gallery.
A guestbook with your own question
Replace the generic prompt with one that fits the day. Written messages are collected alongside the photos and kept with the gallery.
Broadcast it to the people who couldn't come
A private live broadcast is included with the Event Pass: stream up to 90 minutes to 100 viewers on a private link, with sound, and keep the recording afterwards.
Private by default, never indexed
The gallery is only reachable by the link or code you share. Guest pages are blocked from search engines and named AI crawlers, and you can close the gallery whenever you choose.
How it works
Set up in a minute. Collect for the whole event.
Create the event the week of the intocht, so the shoe-setting mornings and the pepernoten on the floor have somewhere to go before the fifth arrives.
Print the QR code on a card and stand it by the fireplace with the shoes, then move it to the coffee table next to the sack on pakjesavond.
As each surprise is opened, someone photographs it and someone records the gedicht as a voice note. Start Live Broadcast for the family in the Netherlands or Belgium before the knock at the door.
Download the originals afterwards and send the gallery link to every household that took part, and to the family who watched from home.
Try uploading as a guest.
Scan this with your phone the way a guest at your event would. Choose a sample photo and upload it from your browser, then open the demo gallery to see it land. Photos pass a quick AI check first; videos wait for a person.
- Scan the code with your phone camera — it opens straight in the browser.
- Upload a sample photo. Look for the upload confirmation so you know it reached the host.
Use a sample you are comfortable sharing with Picsui. Please keep personal or sensitive photos out of the demo.
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This is the same kind of code your guests scan at your event.
Getting the most from Sinterklaas evenings
Decide before the evening who is on photos and who is on poems, because they happen at the same time and the person reading cannot do either. Pakjesavond has a rhythm: a present comes out of the sack, the name is read, the surprise is unwrapped with everyone guessing, then the gedicht is read aloud and everyone laughs at the victim. Ask one person to photograph each surprise as it is revealed and another to hold their phone and record the poem as a voice note while it is read. Do this for every present, not just the clever ones, and by the end of the night you have the whole evening in order, pictures and voices, without anyone having missed a thing.
If your family is abroad, the time difference is the problem to solve first. A pakjesavond in Toronto or Singapore lands in the small hours or the middle of the working day in the Netherlands, so agree with oma and opa a week ahead what time the knock at the door will be, and send them the Live Broadcast link then, not on the night. Put the phone on a stand where it can see the sack and the sofa, and remember that they want to hear the poems more than see them. If they cannot stay up, keep the stream anyway, because the voice notes and photos are waiting in the gallery for their morning coffee.
Write the welcome message on the upload page in Dutch, or Flemish for the Belgian side of the family, so the grandparents know what they are looking at when the link opens. The page itself is in English, Español, Français, but the only thing anyone has to do is tap one button and choose photos from the camera roll, which works for an opa who has never installed anything in his life. Turn on the written guestbook with a prompt like 'Your gedicht, for the record' and ask everyone to type theirs in before the sack arrives, so the poem exists in text as well as in the recording.
Common questions about Sinterklaas evenings
Can the upload page be in Dutch for the family back home?
The upload page itself comes in English, Español, Français, and there is no Dutch version. In practice it does not matter much, because the only action a guest takes is tapping one button and picking photos from their camera roll, with no account, no app and nothing to read. You can write the welcome message at the top in Dutch or Flemish, and the gallery link opens as a plain photo grid. For the grandparents who are nervous with phones, a grandchild scans the code once and leaves the page open for them.
We are in Belgium and the children find everything on the morning of the sixth. Does that change anything?
Only the date you put on the event. Set it to run from the fifth into the morning of the sixth, and the shoe put out the night before, the carrot gone by morning and the children coming downstairs to the presents all land in the same gallery. Families with a Dutch side and a Belgian side often run one event over both evenings, so the pakjesavond in Utrecht and the sixth morning in Antwerp end up together for the grandparents to see.
How do we keep the surprises and the gedichten, not just the photos?
Two ways, and most families use both. The voice guestbook lets anyone record a clip of up to 60 seconds, so each poem can be captured in the reader's own voice as it is performed. The written guestbook, with a prompt of your choosing, lets people type their gedicht in beforehand or afterwards. Both sit in the gallery next to the photos of the surprises, and both come down with the full download at the end, so the poems are not lost with the wrapping paper.
Can oma and opa in the Netherlands watch the evening live?
Yes. Live Broadcast is included with the Event Pass and streams up to 90 minutes with sound to as many as 100 viewers on a private link, and they only need a phone or a laptop browser. That covers the knock at the door, the sack coming in and a good run of surprises and poems. Send them the link a few days before, agree a start time that suits the time difference, and put the phone somewhere it can hear the reading.
The photos are mostly of our children. Who can see them?
Only the people you give the code or the link to. The gallery is private by default, never listed anywhere public, and blocked from search engines and AI crawlers. If cousins or friends are uploading, turn on host review and each photo waits for you before it appears to anyone else. You can close uploads once the evening is over and the gallery stays open for the family to browse, and you can download everything and delete the event whenever you like.
What does one pakjesavond cost?
An Event Pass is $29, paid once for the event with no subscription. It includes unlimited uploads from any number of guests, the voice and written guestbooks, Live Broadcast for the family abroad, host review, full-resolution downloads and 365 days of hosting. If you also want the intocht and the weeks of shoe-setting in the same gallery, start the event early; the pass covers the whole run up to the fifth, not just the one evening.
Every photo from Sinterklaas evenings, in one place
One-time Event Pass, $29. No subscription, no per-guest fee.
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