Download everything

What is in the ZIP

Each contribution that's approved and ready: photos, videos and voice notes, in the order they landed. What's still processing isn't in it, and neither is anything waiting in the review queue. Your own hidden items are — hiding shapes what guests see, not what you keep.

The files are held instead of recompressed, so nothing degrades on the way out and nothing gets smaller either.

1. Wait for the stragglers. Run it a few days past the party, once the second wave has landed.
2. Open Downloads. The tab sits on the event. Download all covers everything approved.
3. Keep the tab open. The file flows as it's built. Closing the tab mid-way halts it.

Originals, not the album versions

What the album shows is a reduced version built to load swiftly on a phone network. The download hands you the file your phone produced, which is the one you need for printing, a photo book or your own archive.

That also explains the size. An album that resembles a few hundred megabytes on screen can be a few gigabytes as originals.

It belongs to the paid plans

Original-quality downloads come with the paid tiers, and that applies to the bulk export, the individual file with the guest download included. On the free tier the API rejects it instead of quietly handing over a smaller version.

If you're on the free tier and want the files, switch plan before the retention window closes instead of after.

The window starts on the event date, and a 14-day grace period comes next before anything is removed.

When to run it

A few days past the party, once the folks who were too busy on the dance floor have uploaded. Running it that night leaves you with an incomplete album; running it 3 months later may reveal the window has closed.

Warning emails go off 14 days, 3 days and 1 day before removal. Treat them like a safety net instead of a plan.

When the album is large

The ZIP flows as it's assembled instead of being built first, so it starts swiftly even for a large event. What it needs from you is a connection that holds up and a tab that's left open — a laptop on a wired connection outperforms a phone on cellular data here.

If a file can't be read it's skipped instead of wrecking the entire archive, and an interrupted download fails loudly instead of handing you a quietly incomplete ZIP.

After you have the files

Now is the time to tidy: remove what you don't want, take the album private, or keep it up for the guests. Once the files sit on your disk, none of those decisions is risky anymore.

Back them up somewhere before the retention window closes. Once it's got, the media is gone from our side too.