How do I approve or hide several photos at once?

Tick up to 50 photos and use Approve selected or Hide selected, or use Select all to act on the whole queue — where Approve never includes a flagged photo.

On the Moderation tab, the photo queue gives you two ways to act on more than one photo:

• Tick the tiles you want, then choose Approve selected or Hide selected from the bar that appears. Picking by hand stops at 50 photos; if you try to tick another, you are told to use Select all instead.
• Select all selects the whole queue — every photo waiting for a decision, including the ones you have not scrolled to yet. The bar then offers Approve, showing how many photos it will approve, and Hide all, showing how many it will hide.

Before Select all changes anything you are asked to confirm, and the question names the exact number of photos. Approving publishes them straight away, including photos you have not opened and photos still waiting for the safety check to finish. Photos that arrive after you confirm are left in the queue. If some photos have left the queue in the meantime — another moderator approved them, say — you are told how many were changed. If the queue has grown so that more photos would change than you agreed to, nothing changes: you are asked to check the new count and try again.

• Approving publishes the photos: they leave the queue and can appear in the gallery, on the slideshow and in the keepsakes. Approving is also the human review they were waiting for, so a flagged photo you ticked and approved yourself does not keep its flag afterwards.
• Hiding keeps the photos out of guests’ sight without deleting them. They stay in the queue, hidden, and do not appear even once the check clears them, until you approve one here or show it from the Content tab.

With photos you ticked by hand, if any of them can no longer be changed — already deleted, say — none of them are changed. You will see an error and the queue will look as it did before you pressed the button.

After approving, the live slideshow and the gallery refresh themselves, so an approved photo can appear on the big screen without anyone reloading. That is the same update a single approval triggers.

Hide selected applies only to the photos you ticked. Auto-Hide Bad Photos is a different tool: it hides every public photo already measured as blurry or too dark, in one pass, without you selecting anything. See What does “Auto-Hide Bad Photos” do?.