Frequently asked questions.

No. Guests scan the QR code, the browser opens, they upload. No account, no app, no login. The native app is optional and only for hosts who want background uploads from their own phone.

Twenty-six locales today, with native review on English so far and machine-translated copy on the rest (with a small footer notice). We're prioritising native review per market based on actual traffic.

Yes — a native host app for iOS and Android (search 'Galeira Host'). It covers everything the web dashboard does plus background photo upload from your camera roll and push notifications for new guest uploads, moderation flags, RSVPs and payments. Guests still don't need any app to upload — the QR code opens the browser.

On paid events the upload window opens on your event date and stays open for 30 days after it — plenty of time for guests to add the photos they took days later. You set the date; if it changes, you can move it once and the window follows.

Run up to 3 events at a time. Without a connected cloud that's 50 photos per event (photos only) with about a month of keeping. Connect your own cloud — free — and each event jumps to 5,000 photos with short video and three months of keeping, and every photo is mirrored to your account. When you finish or delete an event, that free slot opens back up.

You'll be asked to free a slot or upgrade. A slot frees up automatically when you delete an event or when a finished free event's keeping period ends. Or upgrade the event you care about with an Event Duo credit (or an Account plan if you run many) — premium events don't count against the 3 free slots.

Free lets you run up to 3 events at a time with 50 photos each (up to 5,000 when you connect your own cloud, which also keeps the gallery longer). Event Duo is $24 for TWO events — unlimited guests, original quality, a one-year gallery, and every approved photo mirrored to a cloud you own (forever). Account plans start at $39 and make every event you create premium — for planners, venues, and repeat hosts. Everything is one-time; there's no subscription. Full breakdown at /pricing.

Paid plans include a setup guarantee. If your QR upload page or connected cloud backup is not working before your event, email support@galeira.com from the host account and we will either fix it quickly or refund the paid plan within 24 hours. After the event has successfully collected uploads, refunds are reviewed case by case. This guarantee does not cover third-party cloud-provider outages, revoked OAuth permissions, deleted cloud accounts, content removed for legal or policy reasons, or changes of mind after a working event. Full clause at /legal/terms.

Instant in the normal path — Stripe fires a webhook within 1–2 seconds of payment success and the event's plan flips before the redirect lands. If the webhook is delayed, the next dashboard refresh reconciles. If it still hasn't moved after 5 minutes, email support@galeira.com with the Stripe receipt and we'll force-apply.

Nothing is charged and the event stays on its current plan. Stripe surfaces the bank's decline reason in the checkout window so you can try a different card. Half-completed payments expire on Stripe's side in 24 hours — no orphan charges. If you see a pending authorisation on your statement, it drops off within 7 days; we never capture it.

No. Every plan is a one-time payment — Event Duo and Account plans included. Nothing auto-renews, and we never store your card to charge it again. When an Account plan's period ends, it simply ends; we email you first, and you re-buy only if you want to.

Event Duo is one price ($24) for two event credits, so it works out to about $12 per event — cheaper than buying a single event anywhere else. Use the second credit later (an engagement party, a birthday, a friend's wedding), or gift it. Credits are valid for 12 months from purchase.

Yes — Account plans. Instead of buying events one at a time, you get whole-account premium for a fixed period, sized by how many new events you create per month: up to 5, 10, or 30 events/month, for 1 or 6 months. Every event you create while it's active is automatically premium with the same one-year gallery. Starts at $39; the highest volume for the longest term is arranged with us directly. See /pricing.

Nothing you already made gets worse. Every event you created while the plan was active keeps its full one-year gallery from its own event date. The plan ending only means you can't create new premium events until you buy again — your existing galleries are untouched.

Checkout shows your local currency automatically where supported, converted from our US-dollar prices. In the EU and other VAT/GST regions, tax is included in the price you see at checkout — no surprise line item at the end.

Those events keep going exactly as they were. The one-year gallery on each event was locked in at creation and is independent of the plan's own expiry — so an Account event created in month one still keeps its full year even if the plan lapsed months earlier. You just can't spin up new premium events until you renew.

Yes. Settings → Branding → upload your event logo + pick colors. Paid-plan hosts (Event Duo or an Account plan) can also point a custom domain like photos.ourwedding.com at their gallery.

Add a CNAME record pointing your subdomain (e.g. photos.ourwedding.com) to cname.galeira.com. DNS usually propagates in 5–30 minutes; the TLS certificate is issued automatically through Let's Encrypt and is live within a couple of minutes after that. Worst case: 24 hours if your registrar caches aggressively.

Per-file size limits are 100 MB for photos, 4 GB for videos, and 50 MB for audio across every plan. Video duration is where plans differ: 60 seconds on Free (with a connected cloud; Free without a cloud is photos only), 10 minutes on Event Duo, 30 minutes on Account-plan events. Per-event totals follow fair-use caps: Free supports 50 uploads without a cloud and up to 5,000 with one, Event Duo supports up to 25,000, and Account-plan events have much higher limits intended for real events. RAW files count as one item even when paired with a JPEG sidecar.

Yes to all four. Video: MP4, MOV, HEVC, AV1, up to the per-file cap above. Audio messages: M4A or WebM up to 5 minutes. GIFs: rendered inline in the gallery. RAW: CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG and RAF are stored as originals; a web-friendly JPEG preview is generated automatically.

Open /event/YOUR-EVENT/slideshow on any modern browser (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox 90+). It runs full-screen on anything from a phone to a 4K projector, refreshes new photos every 8 seconds, and falls back gracefully on flaky WiFi by re-using the last cached batch. Recommended: a small HDMI stick (Chromecast, Fire TV, Apple TV) plugged into the venue screen.

Guests get a friendly 'uploads have closed for this event' message instead of the upload button. Nothing existing is hidden or deleted — the gallery stays viewable and downloadable for its full keeping period. On Event Duo and Account events the upload window is set automatically to 30 days after your event date; if your date moves, change it once in Settings and the window shifts with it.

Yes — once. Change it to any future date in Dashboard → Event → Settings, and both clocks (the 30-day upload window and the one-year gallery) re-anchor to the new date. It's one change per event so the timeline can't be reset indefinitely.

Original copies live in Cloudflare R2 (encrypted at rest). If you enable cloud mirror, they also live in whatever cloud you connected — Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, S3, or any WebDAV server (Nextcloud, ownCloud, Synology, QNAP).

If cloud mirror is enabled, approved originals already copied to your connected cloud remain in that account — they're yours forever. Our Terms also commit to 90-day shutdown notice, a final mirror pass, and a bulk-download link so you can pull a ZIP of every original before anything is turned off. See our commitments page.

Yes. Dashboard → Event → Download all — produces a ZIP of original files in the order they were uploaded.

Three checks tell the tools apart: where the photos ultimately live, how many cloud destinations are supported, and what the free tier really includes. Galeira mirrors approved uploads to five destinations you own — Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, S3, or WebDAV — as a second copy beside the hosted gallery, commits to 90-day shutdown notice with full ZIP export in our Terms, and ships RAW and audio messages on the free tier. More on the ownership model at back up to your own cloud.

Not today. The platform is hosted-only. If self-hosting is critical (a regulator, a NICU, a corporate compliance requirement), email founders@galeira.com — we run a small enterprise pilot and we can scope it.

Every paid event (Event Duo or Account) keeps its gallery for a full year from the event date — that's the floor. If you've connected your own cloud, every approved photo is also copied there, and those copies are yours forever, even after our one-year copy is cleaned up. See how keeping works.

It means linking a cloud account you already own — Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, S3, or any WebDAV server — so every approved photo is automatically copied there. It's optional and free on every plan. Connecting it is what makes your photos permanent (they live in your account, not just ours) and, on Free, unlocks the bigger 5,000-photo cap and longer keeping.

We clean up our own server copy to keep storage sustainable. If you connected a cloud, your copies stay in that account untouched — nothing of yours disappears. If you never connected a cloud, download the ZIP before the year is up; we email you reminders as the date approaches.

Your event is still fully premium — unlimited guests, original quality, and the gallery kept for a full year from the event date. The only difference is that, without a connected cloud, there's no permanent copy in an account you own: at the one-year mark we clean up our copy, so download the ZIP before then. Connecting a cloud (free, any time) is what makes the photos permanent.

No. We do not use any photo, voice message, comment, or face vector to train any AI model — ours or anyone else's. Even Amazon Rekognition (our moderation provider) discards images after the moderation request.

It's off by default. When a host enables it, we compute mathematical face vectors (embeddings) so each guest can find their own photos. Vectors are encrypted, deleted with the event, never shared, never used to train models, and never matched across events or against third-party face databases. See the privacy policy for the legal basis.

Every upload runs through automated moderation (Amazon Rekognition) for nudity / violence / hate symbols. Flagged photos sit in a quarantine queue the host reviews — guests don't see them until approved. Hosts can also turn moderation off if their guest list is trusted. Anyone can report content via /report.

Yes. Region-specific addenda for 13 jurisdictions (EU, UK, California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Brazil, Canada, Australia, India, Japan + Korea) live at /legal/regions. Data-subject requests go to privacy@galeira.com.

Only people with the QR code or the magic link. Galleries are unlisted by default — no search engine indexes them, no random URL guess works. Hosts can additionally password-protect.

Yes to both. Dashboard → Gallery → tap a photo → Delete removes it everywhere (originals, mirrors, slideshow, downloads). To stop a guest from uploading more, Dashboard → Guests → find them → Block. Their existing uploads can be kept or wiped in the same dialog.

Yes. The gallery, upload page, and host dashboard target WCAG 2.2 AA — semantic landmarks, alt text on every guest-uploaded photo (auto-generated and editable), keyboard navigation on every interactive element, and contrast tested on the default theme. We re-audit with NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver each release. Bugs to accessibility@galeira.com.

Acknowledgement within 72 hours, full response within 30 days (15 days for CCPA). Most requests — access, deletion, portability — complete inside a week. Send to privacy@galeira.com with the email tied to the account; we verify before acting.

Yes. Dashboard → Event → Settings → Transfer ownership → enter the new owner's email. They confirm via a link sent to that address, the seat moves, and you drop down to co-host (or off the event entirely if you choose). The paid plan and all photos travel with the event.