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Nikita Zavada
Nikita Zavada

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How to Handle Telegram Albums in grammY

#typescript #node #redis #backend

When building Telegram bots with grammY, it is natural to expect that a media album arrives as a single message.

In reality, Telegram works differently.

If a user sends an album with multiple photos or videos, your bot receives multiple separate update events instead of one complete post.

For example:

update #1 -> photo_1
update #2 -> photo_2
update #3 -> photo_3

instead of:

single_post -> [photo_1, photo_2, photo_3]
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This quickly creates several annoying problems:

  • duplicate database records
  • race conditions
  • buffering logic
  • ordering issues
  • timeout handling

At first, handling this manually may seem simple.

Usually the implementation starts with something like this:

const mediaGroups = new Map();

// buffering
// sorting
// cleanup
// timeout handling
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But once Redis, multiple workers, or production traffic enter the picture, the logic becomes much more complicated.

The Solution

Install the library telegram-media — a TypeScript library for Node.js that collects Telegram media groups into a single normalized object.

Installation
npm install telegram-media
grammY Example

import { Bot } from "grammy";
import {
  createRedisMediaGroupStorage,
  createTelegramMediaGroup,
} from "telegram-media";

const bot = new Bot(process.env.BOT_TOKEN!);

const collector = createTelegramMediaGroup({
  storage: createRedisMediaGroupStorage(redisClient),

  timeoutMs: 3000,

  supportedMediaTypes: ["photo", "video", "audio"],

  async onCollected(post) {
    console.log("Collected media group:", post);
  },
});

bot.on("message", async (ctx) => {
  await collector.collect(ctx.update);
});

bot.start();
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Why This Helps

Instead of manually buffering Telegram updates, the collector:

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