Storage, plans, and what counts toward your limit

Storage is counted in bytes, not photos: the size of the original files in your albums, added up across everything you host. Guests are never counted; events are a per-plan slot count, in the table below.

What counts

• Every original file in every one of your events: guest uploads and your own, photos and videos, at their uploaded size.
• Hidden photos and photos waiting in Review, since they're stored.
• Anything in Deleted, until it leaves. A removed photo or a deleted event waits 30 days for a possible restore and still counts while it waits; it stops counting the moment it leaves, when you empty Deleted, delete it for good, or its time runs out.
• A clip added to the album, which is an ordinary video once it's there. See add a clip to the event.

What doesn't

• The small preview Partyreel makes for each tile.
• The phone-size copy of each photo, the one guests save to their phones.
• The highlight reel. It plays straight from the album and is never stored as a file, and neither is a clip someone saves to their own phone.

The plans

A rough feel, at an iPhone's default camera settings: 100 MB is about 29 photos, a small gathering's worth, and a single Event Pass is about 7,314 photos or 7 hours of video. The storage meter on your dashboard translates your own plan the same way. See Pro vs. Event Pass.

Uploads

Each plan also allows a set amount of uploading: everything you and your guests add, deletions included, so deleting something never gives its upload back. Free and Pro count it each calendar month; an Event Pass counts its own year, so its event can use the whole allowance in one night. It's sized so a real event doesn't meet it, which is why it sits in the pricing table beside storage. If an album ever did, its guests would see This album has hit its upload limit for now. until the month turns, another pass adds its own, or you move up a size.

Per-file limits

Separately from the total, any single file can be up to 10 GB on every plan, and a host can set a lower per-file cap for guests. See turn off uploads, or cap the size of guest uploads.

Watching it

1. Dashboard
2. storage meter

The ring beside New event on your dashboard turns amber past 85 percent. Tap it to see your albums and Deleted drawn apart against your plan, with Make room from Deleted and Empty Deleted beside them. What happens when it fills is its own guide: what happens when storage fills up.