Why Your Event Photo Link Stops Working
TIME&SPACE · Stories from the Field
A photo link that opened fine yesterday can return an error today. That is a private storage bucket protecting your photo, not a bug, and here is exactly how long each link lasts.
Why Your Event Photo Link Stops Working
In short: Your event photos are never stored at a public web address. Every link you open is a temporary, signed link generated on the spot, and it expires. A link you open from a live gallery lasts 24 hours. A link sent to you in a download email lasts 7 days. Bookmark either one and come back later, and it will stop working exactly on schedule, by design.
A guest scans the gallery, saves the link to a photo, and opens it again a few days later to find an error instead of a photo. The photo is still there. The event is still live. Only the link has stopped working, and that is deliberate.
Your photos are never public
The bucket that holds event photos is private. There is no address that simply shows the photo to anyone who has it, the way a public image URL would. Every time a photo is displayed, whether in the gallery, in a download, or in an email, the request generates a fresh, signed link for that one photo, valid for a set window of time. Once that window closes, the link stops resolving. The underlying photo is untouched.
This matters because event photos sit behind face recognition and guest consent. Treating a photo address like any other public image file would mean anyone who ever had a link could keep it working indefinitely, pass it on, or index it, long after the guest who matched to it ever intended that. A private bucket with short-lived links closes that gap without asking the guest to do anything differently.
How long each link actually lasts
Not every link lasts the same amount of time, because they serve different purposes:
- A link opened from the live gallery is good for 24 hours. This covers browsing, viewing, and downloading in one sitting, including a slow connection at a crowded venue.
- A link sent in a download email is good for 7 days. Email links are meant to be revisited, so they get a longer window than a link generated for the page you are looking at right now.
Both are temporary by design. Neither is meant to be saved as a permanent bookmark.
What to do instead of bookmarking the link
If a link has expired, the fix is never to hunt for the old one. Go back to the event's page and scan again, or open the gallery fresh, and a new signed link is generated the moment you view or download the photo. If you already saved the photo file itself to your phone or computer, that file is yours and is unaffected by anything happening to the link that delivered it.
Organisers see the same behaviour from the other side: a photo shared outside the platform through a saved link, rather than a downloaded file, will eventually stop opening for whoever it was shared with. The fix for a guest or a sponsor is the same: download the file once it is found, rather than relying on the address it arrived at.
Founder, TIME&SPACE