Why an upload gets refused

What does the message on the guest page mean?

The guest page never fails quietly. It puts the reason in 1 short line under the file that stopped, and that line is the fastest thing you can ask a guest to read back to you across a loud room. There are 6 lines it can produce, and each one points at a different limit, a different setting or a different phone.

None of them mean the album is broken. Each one has a fix that either the guest or you can apply in under a minute.

1. Read the message back. The guest page names the reason in 1 line. Ask for it word for word before you start guessing.
2. Ask for type and length. Photo or video, and how long it runs. Those 2 answers place the file on 1 row of the table below.
3. Retry on cellular data. A send that dropped leaves nothing behind, so a second attempt off the venue Wi‑Fi costs nothing.

Read the line, then ask for the file type and how long it runs. Those 2 answers put the file on 1 row of this table without any guesswork.

Why did the video get refused when the photos went through?

Because photos and videos are held to different ceilings, and only video ever meets one. A photo may be 25 MB and a voice message 50 MB on every plan, which a single shot from a phone camera does not come close to. Video is capped by the clip length your plan permits, and a camera fills that budget in seconds.

A free album takes 30 seconds of video. Essential takes 5 minutes, Celebrate 10 minutes, Grand 15 minutes. Across 138 production videos measured on August 31, 2026, the median clip wrote 1.84 MB every second, so those minutes turn into real gigabytes quickly.

The practical answer is the same at every level: a shorter clip. A guest who sends 3 clips of 40 seconds each gets all 3 into the album, and those are the ones somebody actually watches later.

Does renaming a file to .jpg fix a format problem?

No. What gets read is the first handful of bytes inside the file, not the name on the end of it, so a video saved as photo.jpg is turned away just as quickly as one that was honest about itself. A file that got corrupted on the phone is caught by the same check, before anything is processed.

The accepted list is short because it is the list phones actually write: MP4, MOV and WebM for video; JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC for photos; WAV, OGG, M4A or WebM for voice messages. HEIC comes off an iPhone by default and needs no conversion from anybody.

Out of space, or out of moments?

They read almost the same on a phone, and they come from 2 different counters. Storage is the gigabytes an album can hold: 5 GB on the free plan, then 50, 100 and 250. The item count is how many separate files it accepts, and only the free plan has one at all — 60 moments, whatever they weigh.

Every paid plan takes an unlimited number of files, so on those the only counter that can fill is storage. When a free album stops at 60 items with gigabytes to spare, the plan is the thing to change, not the files.

The upload stopped halfway. Where did the file go?

Nowhere. A send that breaks mid-way leaves no album entry, uses no storage and produces no confirmation, because the file never arrived whole. There is no failed status to hunt for in your dashboard — a file that did not make it simply is not there, and the guest can send it again with nothing to clean up first.

A room of phones uploading at once is hard on a venue network. Turning Wi‑Fi off and sending over cellular data is the 1 thing worth trying before anybody looks at settings.

Can my own event settings turn a file away?

Yes, and these are the causes that have nothing to do with the file itself. Video and voice messages can each be switched off for a single event, and while they are off every clip of that kind is refused whatever its size or length. An event can also cap clip length below what its plan would otherwise allow.

2 more settings work the same way from a different angle. Uploads can be closed by hand at any moment, and a paid album stays a draft until the payment clears — in both cases the guest reads that the event is not accepting uploads right now.

What to check before the codes go on the tables

Send 1 photo and 1 video to your own album from a phone that is not yours, a week before anything gets printed. That single run tells you whether video is switched on, whether your plan matches the clips your guests will shoot, and what the guest page looks like to somebody seeing it for the first time.

Then pick the plan on the longest clip you expect rather than on the guest count. 15 minutes of 4K from 1 enthusiastic uncle weighs more than every photo the rest of the room will send.

What to tell guests on the night

Short clips, and cellular data if the venue network is struggling. That is the whole briefing, and it clears 5 of the 6 lines in the table above.