Deleting photos and videos

As the host you have full control over what stays in the gallery. PixVenu offers three deletion paths depending on whether you're culling one shot or a hundred.

Single photo via the lightbox

Open any photo in the host dashboard lightbox. The delete affordance lives in the moderation row with an AlertDialog gate so you can't sleepwalk through it. Confirming moves the photo to Trash — guests stop seeing it immediately, but the file isn't actually gone yet.

Bulk delete via the action bar

Multi-select photos by checkbox (or hit Select all N in the floating bar at the bottom of the page) and click Delete. The confirm dialog quotes the count back so you can sanity-check before committing. Same outcome as single-photo: bulk Trash, recoverable.

After a bulk delete, the success toast carries an Undo action for 8 seconds — one click reverts every deletion in the batch. Useful when you delete an album and immediately realize you wanted to keep one shot.

Trash and recovery

The Trash section on the host detail page lists every soft-deleted photo (newest-deleted first). Each tile offers:

• Restore — moves the photo back to the gallery with its original state (caption, album, moderation state) intact.
• Purge — irreversible. Removes the photo from the database AND the underlying storage object. There's no recovery after a purge.

Bulk-select inside Trash lets you restore or purge a whole batch in one shot. The toolbar has an Empty Trash button that purges every photo in Trash with a count-aware confirm dialog. Storage objects are cleaned up in lockstep — purging is not just a row delete.

Recovery windows

Soft-deleted photos stay in Trash indefinitely — there's no automatic purge after a fixed window. The host decides when to clean up for good. Plan to download a ZIP of anything precious BEFORE you purge — restoration after a purge requires support intervention and isn't guaranteed.

Hidden vs deleted

Don't confuse delete with hide. Hidden photos (via the lightbox Hide affordance) stay in your grid with a muted "Hidden" badge — guests don't see them, but they're not in Trash either. Use Hide for ambiguous content you want to revisit; use Delete when you've decided.

Guest-uploaded photos

If a guest uploaded a photo and immediately regretted it, they can self-delete via the "You uploaded this" badge that appears for their own browser's session (localStorage-scoped, time-bounded). That deletes the photo from the host's perspective too — but the host can still recover from Trash. See the "Delete your own photo" guest article for details.