Moderating guest photos
Approve every upload before guests see it, hide individual shots, or auto-hide photos guests have reported.
~3 min read
By default, every guest upload is visible to other guests the moment it lands — no waiting. For events where you want to review each photo before it appears (children's parties, business events, anywhere you might want stricter editorial control), turn on the gallery's moderation toggle.
With moderation on, new uploads land in a "pending" state — visible to you on the host dashboard but hidden from other guests until you approve them. The guest who uploaded it still sees their own photo in a "your uploads" section, so they're never confused about whether their submission went through. The moderation queue lives at the top of your gallery's host page; you can scroll, expand each photo, and approve or hide with a single click. Bulk approve all pending in one click is also available when you trust a batch wholesale.
For galleries running without moderation, individual photos can still be hidden at any time from the lightbox host controls — useful when one slipped through that you'd rather not show. Hidden photos stay in the gallery but only you can see them; you can restore them later if you change your mind.
Guests can also flag photos they find inappropriate via a small "Report" button in the lightbox. Flagged photos appear in a separate "Reported by guests" section on your dashboard so you can review and decide. If you'd like flags to auto-hide a photo until you've reviewed, enable the auto-hide-flagged toggle in the gallery settings. By default the toggle is off; turning it on auto-hides a photo once 5 guests have independently flagged it. The 5-flag threshold is tunable in the same settings card (range 1 – 50) — dial it down to 1 or 2 for paranoid posture on a kids-party gallery, or up to 20+ for a high-volume public event where occasional false flags shouldn't pull content. The threshold only kicks in when the toggle is on; with the toggle off, flags accumulate visibly in the "Reported by guests" section but the photo stays public until you act.
Email notifications keep you in the loop without you having to keep the dashboard open — you can opt into per-flag emails and per-comment emails from the gallery settings (both on by default). The /home dashboard also has dedicated "Waiting for your approval" and "Reported by guests" widgets that surface activity across every gallery you manage.
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