Moving photos between albums

Albums need a paid plan. Moving photos between albums assumes you have albums — an Essential-and-above feature. Free galleries collect everything in one stream, so there's nothing to re-file. See Free vs paid galleries.

Photos that landed in the wrong album (or the "no album" general bucket) can be moved any time after upload. PixVenu offers two paths:

Single-photo move

Open the photo in the lightbox from your host dashboard. The album picker in the host actions row above the comments thread lets you reassign the photo to any of the gallery's albums (or back to "no album"). The move applies immediately; the photo disappears from its old album tab and shows up under the new one. Guests viewing the gallery via realtime see the same change live without a refresh.

Bulk move

For batches, multi-select photos in the host viewer (tap each tile's checkbox or use the Select all N button in the action bar at the bottom of the page) and pick the destination album from the Move to dropdown. PixVenu fires a single bulk update so the entire selection moves in one DB write — fast even for hundreds of photos.

What about the originals?

Moving doesn't re-upload or transform anything — the original file stays put in storage. Only the photo's album_id foreign key changes. Captions, host favorites, pins, like counts, comments, EXIF stripping, rotation — every photo-level property survives the move.

Tips for organizing

• Set up your albums BEFORE sharing the QR. Guests scan the master QR by default; if your event has phases (ceremony, reception, after-party), they'll land in "no album" until you move things later. A pre-event album setup means guests can pick the right destination at upload time via the album picker in the upload dialog.
• Use per-album QR codes for venue signage that should drop guests into a specific album. The album QR is still scoped to one album by default but lets guests navigate to others — so you get the right default without sacrificing flexibility.
• The "no album" bucket is just album_id = null. It's a real bucket — guests browsing the gallery's master tab see those photos alongside the per-album ones. Moving INTO the no-album state is the "remove from album" action.

For deleted albums

If you delete an album that still has photos, those photos move back to the "no album" general bucket — they're not lost. The FK is ON DELETE SET NULL so the deletion is non-destructive at the photo level.