Are downloads full resolution?

When you export the album you get a zip named after your event, containing every completed photo plus every written well wish.

Each photo keeps the filename the guest's phone gave it, so you will see a lot of IMG_4820.jpg and similar. Where two guests happen to upload files with the same name, a number is added rather than one quietly overwriting the other. Nothing is renamed beyond that, and nothing is merged.

Well wishes come out as small text files, one per message, named after the guest who wrote it. It is worth opening a couple before you archive the folder, because they are easy to overlook next to a few hundred photos and they are often the part people are most glad to still have years later.

Videos are not in the zip. A single phone video can be larger than a hundred photos, and an archive that size is slow to build and prone to failing partway through. Keeping them out means the photo download completes reliably, and videos are listed on their own so you can take them individually.

Every uploaded photo exists twice: the original, and a lighter version generated for display.

The gallery always shows the lighter one. That is why a gallery scrolls smoothly on a phone at a venue, and it is also why the version on screen can look softer than what you end up with. Downloads always reach past that to the original.

The practical consequence is that you should judge quality from a download rather than from the gallery. If a photo looks soft on screen, download it before concluding anything about it.

Only photos that have finished uploading and finished processing go into an export. A photo still being processed when you start a download will not be in that archive, though it will be in the next one.

This matters most in the days right after the event, while guests are still uploading. If you download on the night, you get the night's photos. Most of the best ones arrive over the following week, which is why it is worth downloading again a week or two later rather than treating the first export as the final one.

Guests can download individual photos when Allow guest downloads is switched on in Album settings. What they get is the same original file you would get.

With the setting off, the download controls are hidden from guests entirely rather than shown and then refused. That extends to links already in flight: an export a guest started shortly before you switched the setting off stops working too, so turning it off takes effect immediately rather than leaking for a while afterwards. Your own access as host is never affected by it.