An upload is missing

It is still being prepared

Between the tap and the picture in the album, the file is checked and prepared for display. For a photo that is seconds; for a long video it is minutes, because there is more to compute. During that time the guest sees nothing of it in the album.

That is the explanation behind most reports of a missing file within the first few minutes. It is worth telling guests, or they send the same clip a second time.

1. Give it a minute. Preparation takes seconds for a photo and minutes for a long video.
2. Check the review queue. With review-first on, nothing appears until you approve it.
3. Check the hidden area. Anything you hid collects there and can be restored.

It is waiting for your approval

If the event reviews contributions first, everything lands in a queue and stays invisible until you decide — to you it is in Moderation, to everyone else it does not exist yet. That includes the guest who sent it.

The event overview tells you how many are waiting without you opening the queue at all.

You hid it

A hidden contribution leaves the shared album and collects in its own area, ready to be restored. It is easy to hide something during a fast tidy-up pass and not remember doing it, especially the morning after a party.

The hidden area is the first place to look when a guest insists they sent something and you can see it in your export.

Only 1 of these is a decision you made. The others are states, and they resolve on their own or with 1 click.

It was the same file twice

Every file gets a checksum on arrival, and within one event an identical file counts exactly once. A guest who was unsure the first attempt worked and sent it again sees no second entry — which reads as a missing upload and is the opposite.

This applies to genuinely identical files. A re-exported version of the same shot is a different file and appears separately.

Or it never arrived

A dropped upload leaves nothing behind: no entry, no placeholder, nothing in your dashboard. The difference from the states above is that the guest saw a message at the time rather than a confirmation.

Ask what their screen said when they sent it. Confirmation means it is somewhere; an error means it is not.

There is no failed state to look for

A contribution never sits in the album marked as broken. If preparation does not complete, the entry simply stays in the processing state rather than flipping to something you could filter for.

So a contribution that has been processing for an hour is worth reporting. That is not normal and it will not resolve by waiting longer.