Your album stays up until you delete it. There is no countdown on it, no "expires in" badge, no email one day telling you to pay or lose the wedding. On Free and on Pro, deleting is the only way an event ends, and you are the one who does it.
That is a strange promise for a company that pays for storage, so the trade behind it deserves spelling out: what it costs, what the two safety nets around it are, and the single case where a clock does run.
No end date, on purpose
The obvious feature request is an "end event" button: the party is over, close it, tidy the dashboard. It does not exist, and the reason is not tidiness.
An event that could be ended while keeping its photos would be free storage with extra steps. Fill an event, end it, create the next one, repeat. Fill, end, repeat, forever, on a free account. Every product that offers an end-event button has to answer that somehow, usually by quietly deleting the media, which is the opposite of what a host means by "ending" an album.
So the model is blunt instead: an event exists until you delete it, deleting destroys its media, and that is what frees the slot and the space. The upside for you is that nothing on your account is on a timer. The upside for us is that storage is bounded by what people are willing to keep. Both halves are the same design.
The Trash is the undo
Deleting is the only exit, which makes it worth being careful about, so it is not instant.
A deleted event, and any single photo or video you remove, moves to the Trash and sits there for 30 days. During that window you can restore it and it returns exactly as it was, including its place in the album and whether it was hidden. After that it is permanently gone, and gone means gone: the file is deleted from storage and there is no copy to ask for.
You can also clear something out of the Trash yourself before the window runs down, if you want it truly deleted today. Space, in the meantime, comes back the moment you press delete, not at the end of the window. The mechanics are in how long your media is kept.
The inactivity clock (Free only)
One more clock exists, and it touches free events only.
A free event that nobody touches for 180 days gets a warning email 14 days before anything happens, and then moves into the Trash, where the usual recovery window applies. "Touched" is generous: signing in, adding a photo, editing the event, a guest uploading, any of it resets the count. This is aimed squarely at abandoned test events, not at your album.
Paid events are exempt. An Event Pass or a Pro event can sit untouched for years, which is the point of paying for it.
The one exception: the Event Pass year
Here is the clock that does run, said plainly, because it is the one thing on this page that could surprise you.
An Event Pass covers one event for about a year. It is a one-time payment, not a subscription, and a year is a deliberate choice: long enough that a wedding album survives the first anniversary. Then:
- A nudge goes out 14 days before the pass lapses, so the end of the term is never news.
- A renewal costs $15 and chains another year onto the end of the current one, so renewing early never loses you time.
- If you let it lapse, the event does not disappear. It drops to the Free plan, keeps the same link, and keeps its album.
- If it now holds more than Free allows, you get 45 days of grace to upgrade or clear space before anything is reduced, with a reminder before the deadline.
Worth knowing before you choose: Free is photos only, so a lapsed pass on an event full of video is the case to plan for. If you are going to want the album alive for a long time, Pro versus Event Pass is the comparison to read, and the prices are on the pricing page.
What "nothing vanishes silently" means
Strip the specifics away and one rule sits under all of it: every removal the system performs is announced first, and lands somewhere recoverable second.
Warning, then Trash, then deletion. The inactivity sweep warns before it moves anything. The over-capacity flow warns, then reminds, then reduces largest items first. The renewal nudge arrives before the pass ends, not after. Nothing that leaves your album leaves it in one step, and nothing that leaves it is a surprise.
The only exception, and it is deliberate, is you. When you delete something on purpose there is no email about it, because you already know. It just waits in the Trash for you to change your mind.
Two things follow from all this. Size the plan for what you are really collecting, which the storage guide makes easy, and remember that a permanent album is what makes the reel worth coming back to a year later. If you are picking a plan today, start on the pricing page and choose for how long you want the album, not just how big it is.
