Capturing Telegram messages — text, images, video and documents
Updated October 29, 2026
The core idea behind Laraue Boards is that work is already happening in Telegram. A client request, a bug report, a photo of something that needs fixing — these are all issues, they just haven't been structured yet. Laraue Boards captures them directly.
Forwarding a message to the bot
The simplest way to capture a message:
- Long-press any message in any Telegram chat
- Tap Forward
- Choose @msgboard_bot as the recipient
- The message becomes an issue on your default board immediately
This works for text messages, photos, videos, documents, and albums.
What gets captured
When you forward a message, Laraue Boards saves:
- The text content of the message (up to 4096 characters)
- Photos and videos — shown as thumbnails on the issue page, fetched from Telegram in original quality when you open them
- Documents — PDF, Word (DOCX, DOC), Markdown, TXT and JSON files, and images sent as a file, attached to the issue for download (see Attachments for formats and limits)
- Sender name — shown, with the time, in the issue preview the bot sends in Telegram (
/save,/info, inline search) - Timestamp — when the original message was sent
What is not captured: reactions, replies, forwarded-from attribution chains, voice message transcriptions, and files of other types.
Files that aren't saved
A document of a type that isn't supported (an archive, a spreadsheet, an executable…), or one over its size limit, is skipped. The rest of the message — its text and any supported attachments — is still saved, and the bot tells you which file was left out and why:
/saveand/aisavealways mention skipped files in their reply.- In a chat that saves every message, the bot only replies when the skipped file was all the message had — no issue is created then. If the message also had text or other attachments, the issue is saved without the file and nothing is said.
- Edits never produce a notice: replacing a document with an unsupported one removes it from the issue quietly.
Attachments on the issue
There are no thumbnails on the board card — media only shows up once you open the issue. The detail page has an Attachments section below the content, showing every photo and video as a small thumbnail. Tap one to open the full image.
From here you can also add more images yourself — with Attach files (the paperclip), or paste one directly with Ctrl+V — and remove any attachment with the × on its thumbnail.
Where the issue came from
An issue created from Telegram has a Created via row in the sidebar of its page, next to Created: the Telegram icon and the name of the chat it came from.
When Telegram can open the message, the row ends with a link icon (↗) that opens it. Whether there is one depends on the chat:
- Public group (it has an @username) — the link opens the message for anyone.
- Private group — the link opens the message only for members of the group; everyone else gets an error from Telegram.
- Small group (a basic group, not upgraded to a supergroup) — no link: Telegram has no links to messages there.
- Your private chat with the bot, including messages you forward to it — shown as private chat with the bot, with no link.
Everyone who can see the issue sees the same row and link; Boards can't tell whether you're a member of the chat.
When Telegram upgrades a small group to a supergroup (for example, when a group gets an @username or a lot of members), messages are numbered anew. Issues saved before the upgrade keep the Created via row but have no link; issues saved after it link to their messages as usual.
Text-only issues
A message does not need text to become an issue. A photo with no caption becomes a media-only issue — the issue page shows the thumbnails with an empty description, and its title is generated from the kind of media, the time and the chat, like image-20260930-101500-Chat name. A document with no caption takes its file name as the title, like contract.pdf.
Manually created issues
Issues created by tapping + Add issue are not linked to any Telegram message. They have the same fields (content, status, attributes) but no sender or media from Telegram; their Created via row shows the web app.