Download everything

What is in the ZIP

Every contribution that is approved and prepared: photos, videos and voice notes, in the order they arrived. What is still processing is not in it, and neither is anything sitting in the review queue. Your own hidden items are — hiding affects what guests see, not what you keep.

The files are stored rather than recompressed, so nothing is degraded on the way out and nothing gets smaller either.

1. Wait for the stragglers. Run it a few days after the party, once the second wave has arrived.
2. Open Downloads. The tab sits on the event. Download all covers everything approved.
3. Keep the tab open. The file streams as it is built. Closing the tab mid-way stops it.

Originals, not the album versions

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

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

It belongs to the paid plans

Original-quality downloads are part of the paid tiers, and that applies to the package export, the single file and the guest download alike. On the free tier the API refuses it rather than quietly handing over a smaller version.

If you are on the free tier and want the files, change plan before the retention window closes rather than after.

The window runs from the event date, and a 14-day grace period follows it before anything is removed.

When to run it

A few days after the party, once the people who were too busy dancing have uploaded. Running it on the night gets you an incomplete album; running it 3 months later risks discovering the window has closed.

Warning emails go out 14 days, 3 days and 1 day before removal. Treat them as a safety net rather than a plan.

When the album is large

The ZIP streams as it is assembled rather than being built first, so it starts quickly even for a big event. What it needs from you is a connection that stays up and a tab that stays open — a laptop on a wired connection beats a phone on mobile data here.

If a file cannot be read it is skipped rather than corrupting the whole archive, and an interrupted download fails visibly instead of handing you a quietly incomplete ZIP.

After you have the files

Now is the moment to tidy: delete what you do not want, make the album private, or leave it up for the guests. With the files on your own disk, none of those decisions is risky any more.

Back them up somewhere before the retention window closes. Once it has, the media is gone on our side too.