Biometric gallery management at crowded venues involves using mobile devices to ascertain the most proximate people to a station that performs biometric identification. A preliminary identification of those people may be generated that enables biometric data for those most proximate people to be obtained from a main gallery. A local gallery may be populated from the main gallery using the preliminary identification. Biometric identification may be attempted to be performed using the local gallery. This may enable the local gallery to be sufficiently small so as to increase speed and accuracy of biometric identification while ensuring that the most likely biometric data needed for biometric identifications is available in the local gallery since the associated people are those most proximate to the station that will perform the biometric identification.