How Do You Forward Only Photos, Videos or Files From a Telegram Chat?

The six kinds a message can carry

The distinction between a photo and a document matters more than it looks: the same picture sent "as a file" is a document, not a photo, and a list that allows only photos will not let it through.

• Photo — an image sent as a picture.
• Video — a video sent as a video.
• Document — a file, including images sent as files rather than as pictures.
• Audio — a music or audio file.
• Voice — a recorded voice note.
• Sticker — a sticker.

What the list does, exactly

The allowed list keeps only the kinds you name; the blocked list drops the kinds you name. Both apply only to messages that carry an attachment: a text-only message is not touched by either list and goes through as usual.

That last point is the one that catches people. If your intention was "only send me pictures, never plain chat", a media list alone will not do it, because the plain chat has no media type to test. What you want is the separate media-only switch below.

Media-only mode: drop everything without an attachment

Media-only mode is a different switch with a different job: it drops any message that has no attachment at all, and it can be narrowed to specific kinds on top of that. Use it when the destination is meant to be a stream of charts, files or recordings and the surrounding conversation is noise.

The two can be combined. Media-only mode decides whether an attachment is required; the media lists decide which kinds are acceptable.

What travels with the attachment

A forwarded attachment keeps its caption, its formatting and its quality: nothing is re-encoded, resized or stripped on the way. If the rule adds a header or a footer, that text is added to the caption, and if find and replace is set up, it runs on the caption as well.

Things that are not media types

Polls, dice, contacts, locations and similar are not attachments in this sense and are not covered by these lists. They are re-created in the destination as the same kind of object where Telegram allows it, and described in text where it does not.