Reveal Mode
Reveal mode keeps a published gallery’s photos hidden from guests until you decide they can see them — manually, or at a time you schedule. The link works, the password works, and guests can still upload their own photos. They just do not see yours yet.
The intended use is the party: guests upload their phone shots during the evening, and your edit lands the following week in one moment rather than trickling in.
Available on stable from v3.132.1, and on beta before that. See Release Channels.
Turning it on
On the gallery page, open Settings → Guest interaction and tick Reveal mode (hide gallery until reveal). On stable it is in the event’s Information card.
The option only appears when guest uploads are enabled for that event, and it is cleared if you later turn guest uploads off. Reveal mode was built around the upload-during-the-event flow, so a gallery with no upload channel cannot use it. If you only want to withhold a gallery entirely, use draft mode instead.
Scheduled reveal (optional) sets the moment it opens by itself. Leave it empty to reveal by hand.
Reveal mode is off by default, and there is no setting for it on the create-event form — publish the event first, then enable it.
What guests see before the reveal
The gallery link and the password page behave exactly as normal. Once past the password, instead of photos they get a waiting screen: “The photos are still a surprise”, with the scheduled time if you set one, and the upload button if you invited them to contribute.
Nothing leaks. The gallery returns no photos and no categories, so counts, category names and thumbnails are all absent rather than merely hidden in the interface.
The following are all blocked while hidden, each with a clear refusal rather than an empty result: viewing or downloading a photo, thumbnails and previews, download-all and selected downloads, feedback of every kind, the people bar, view tracking and stats, and the older image routes. Social previews are suppressed too, so pasting the link into a chat does not reveal a cover photo.
Revealing
Either press Reveal now on the event’s overview (on the beta channel under Help the client, which needs events.edit), or let the scheduled time arrive. The check is made per request against the scheduled time, so the reveal is exact even if the background job is running late.
A guest with the page already open does not need to do anything: the gallery refetches at the scheduled moment and polls every minute after that.
Revealing does not send an email. It fires a gallery.revealed workflow trigger, so if you want guests notified, wire that up in Workflows.
Who can see through it
Four kinds of access bypass reveal mode: your own admin preview, slideshow links, client PIN access, and customer-portal logins. Guest uploads stay open for everyone regardless.
Draft, reveal or expiry?
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| Nobody can reach the gallery at all, while you prepare it | Draft mode — the link does not resolve |
| Guests can arrive, log in and upload, but not see your photos yet | Reveal mode |
| The gallery should stop working after a date | Expiration — see Gallery Management |
Download Resolutions
Separately from reveal mode, you can cap the size of the files guests download — hand out web-sized images by default and keep full-resolution files for the people who paid for them.
Available on stable from v3.132.1, and on beta before that.
Global settings
Settings → Download resolutions.
| Setting | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Standard resolution | Original (full size) | What every gallery hands out unless it overrides. |
| Let guests choose a download size | off | Adds a size picker to bulk downloads. Choices are never larger than the standard. |
| Offer “Original” in the picker | off | Off deliberately: if you lowered the standard, you usually do not want full-resolution files handed out anyway. |
| Available sizes | Large 3000×2000, Medium 1500×1000, Small 800×600 | Editable list of label plus width and height. |
Sizes are an upper bound. Aspect ratio is preserved and photos are never enlarged, so a smaller original comes back untouched.
Per gallery
A gallery can override the site-wide settings for itself alone: under Settings → Downloads → Download resolution on the gallery page, or in the Download resolution card on the event’s Overview tab on stable. Each option can be left on Inherit, which follows Settings and shows the value it currently inherits.
What guests experience
With the picker off, the cap is silent: guests press download and get the size you chose.
With it on, bulk downloads open a Choose a download size dialog listing each preset with its pixel bound, then prepare the archive on demand. The picker appears for Download All and for a selection — never for a single photo, which always uses the standard.
How it combines with other controls
Downloads are gated in this order: the event’s allow downloads setting, then the per-category download permission, then the resolution cap. Watermarks are applied after resizing, so a watermark stays proportionate on a smaller file.
Videos, HEIC and HEIF files are never resized. Changing the standard resolution invalidates cached archives, including those of galleries that inherit it.
Capped files are re-encoded with the orientation baked in. They keep the original’s EXIF, XMP and IPTC metadata (stable from v3.133.6, beta channel from v3.144.1-beta.0, PicPeak PR #1678 ); older builds stripped it. Files that already fit inside the box are returned byte-identical, metadata included. Archives built through the picker are named with the chosen size, ordinary downloads keep your usual filename rules.
The cap controls download size; it is not a guarantee that originals never leave the server. The gallery’s photo display route still serves the stored original under basic protection. (A legacy secure-download link that did the same was removed on the beta channel in v3.142.2-beta.0 and on stable in v3.134.7.) If full-resolution files must never be obtainable, pair the cap with watermarking and a higher protection level rather than relying on it alone.
Keeping prepared downloads
With the size picker on, archives are prepared on demand and deleted after a while. On the beta channel from v3.171.0-beta.0 (PicPeak PR #1951 ) Keep prepared downloads for (hours) on Settings → Download resolutions sets how long: 1 to 168 hours, default 1 (the fixed value before the setting). Each prepared download takes about as much disk space as the photos in it, and the value applies to downloads prepared after the change. Archives that nobody can receive any more (gallery expired, archived, deleted or downloads switched off) are removed early.
Guests whose email address PicPeak has verified, and customer-portal users, can ask to be emailed when their download is ready. See Gallery Interface → Prepared downloads.
Related
- Photo Protection — watermarks and protection levels.
- Photo Categories & Folders — per-category download permissions.