Grand Old Party time for Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention

The Republican National Convention is an enormous event attended by up to 50,000 people, including 15,000 members of the media. News agencies send large teams of photographers to cover every aspect of the event, big and small, from portraits of the major political figures to the patriotic outfits worn by some of the delegates.

The 2016 event is taking place in Cleveland, Ohio from 18-21 July. In this gallery, IBTimes UK looks at some of the best photos of the convention so far.

Day one: 18 July

The mood on the first day of the convention was sombre, with speaker after speaker delivering emotive speeches about police shootings and fears of terrorism. The calm was shattered in a brief explosion of anger, with much shouting and chanting, as Trump's backers faced down a revolt from Republican delegates opposed to him. And then there was the party's lurch to the right, adopting a series of socially conservative policies on abortion and gay rights.

So, a disastrous day for the party, no? Not really. The main focus of the press coverage and social-media chatter wasn't the infighting and bigotry. There was only one story of the convention: Donald Trump's wife Melania gave a speech containing a couple of passages that strongly resembled one given by Michelle Obama in 2008. The embarrassing and very public gaffe is bad news for Mrs Trump, but possibly good news for her husband and his party.

Trump himself made a brief, but showy, entrance at the convention to introduce his wife. Emerging from shadows to the strains of Queen's We Are The Champions, he declared, "We're going to win, we're going to win so big." In her speech Mrs Trump portrayed her husband as a talented, compassionate and unrelenting leader who would unify rather than divide the country if elected to the White House.

Trump doesn't seem to have done much to unify the Republican Party. Divisions erupted on the convention floor on day one after party officials adopted rules by a shouted voice vote. Anti-Trump forces seeking to derail his nomination responded with loud and angry chants. The turmoil threatened efforts by the Trump campaign to show the party had united behind him.

The convention is being held in Cleveland amid a period of violence and unrest, both in the US and around the world. Three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the eve of the convention's opening day. In recent weeks, Americans have seen deadly police shootings, a shocking ambush of police in Texas and escalating racial tensions. In world news, there has been a failed coup in Turkey and gruesome Bastille Day attack in Nice, France.

The theme for the first day of the convention was Make America Safe Again. Speakers painted a bleak picture of a nation gripped by insecurity, and they blamed the turbulence on weak leadership by President Barack Obama and Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton, who spent four years in his administration. The convention's opening night featured a string of emotional speakers attacking Clinton's record as secretary of state, many arguing she had made Americans vulnerable to Islamist militancy.

"I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son," said Pat Smith, the mother of an information management officer who was among the four Americans killed in an attack on a US mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

Trump continually boasts he will make America great again, but he has offered virtually no details of any policies; just repeated and vague vows to be tough. He has sought to position himself as the law-and-order candidate, in an echo of Republican Richard Nixon's successful presidential campaign of 1968. At the convention, the party adopted a platform that Christian conservatives are cheering as the most conservative statement of party policy principles in recent memory. It reaffirms the party's opposition to gay marriage and bathroom choice for transgender people.

Americans of a less conservative nature, however, are outraged by Trump's stand on immigration, including his proposal to build a wall at the Mexican border and his call for barring Muslims from entering the US. Trump has also been criticised for insults directed at women, political opponents and journalists. On the first night of the convention, a lone protester from the liberal activist group Code Pink managed to stage her own one-woman demonstration inside the venue, trying to unfurl a banner during a speech by Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.

Day two: 19 July 2016

The theme for the second day of the Republican convention was Make America Work Again, and Mr Trump put his family to work. Four of his five children attended the convention, with two of them delivering speeches about him. "For my father, impossible is just the starting point," said Donald Trump Jr, eldest of the nominee's five children. Tiffany Trump, the candidate's 22-year-old daughter with his ex-wife Marla Maples, sprinkled her remarks with rarely heard anecdotes about her father, including the handwritten notes he left on her childhood report cards.

It is certainly unusual for a candidate's children to address delegates, but there were not a lot of big names to fill the convention speech slots. Many noteworthy Republicans declined to attend, including two living former presidents, George HW Bush and George W Bush; former presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney; vanquished Trump primary rivals, including the host-state governor, John Kasich; and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Trump's campaign did succeed in tamping down late efforts by dissident delegates to derail the convention. Campaign officials invested significant time arguing to delegates about the importance of presenting a united front during the televised convention. There was one subject on which everybody was united: Hillary Clinton. Speaker after speaker took aim at Clinton, presenting her as out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans and the inheritor of Obama's "oppressive" administration.

Former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson deviated from his prepared remarks and said one of Clinton's former mentors, Saul Alinsky, included Lucifer in the acknowledgment for a book. "Are we willing to elect someone as president who has, as their role model, somebody who acknowledges Lucifer?" Carson, a Seventh-Day Adventist, asked delegates. Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, led the crowd in a call-and-response mock trial of Clinton. "As a failure for ruining Libya and creating a nest for terrorist activity by Isis [Islamic State]. Is she guilty or not guilty?" The crowd roared: "Guilty!"

There were no major missteps on the second day, but the event was void of the glitzy, Hollywood touch Trump had promised. The roll call of the states delivered Trump the nomination, which he welcomed from afar in a videotaped message saying "This is a movement, but we have to go all the way." House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that Trump had amassed 1,725 delegates, more than triple the number of his nearest competitor.

With the convention half over, the massive protests that many Republican leaders had feared have mostly failed to pan out. Although police broke up scuffles between demonstrators, protesters appeared outnumbered by police officers and journalists. Overall at this point, there were only five arrests since the convention started, and protesters have numbered in the hundreds, not thousands.

Day three of the convention will bring Trump's running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, a favourite of evangelicals, onto the stage. Also in attendance will be Ted Cruz, the man Trump used to call "Lyin' Ted". His address will be keenly watched as a barometer of the party's fighting spirit as the Republican Party turns to the campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton, who accepts her nomination next week.