I’m working on a Telegram bot and running into a frustrating problem. The bot can forward regular text messages just fine, but whenever I try to forward messages that have images or videos attached, it completely fails to send them.
I’m using a basic forwarding setup but something isn’t working right with media files. Has anyone dealt with this before? Any ideas what might be causing this?
CHANNEL_ID = "*******"
if incoming_msg:
bot.forward_message(CHANNEL_ID, incoming_msg.chat.id, incoming_msg.message_id)
Really hoping someone can point me in the right direction here. Thanks in advance for any help!
Had this exact issue about six months ago and it drove me crazy for days. The forward_message method should handle multimedia content without any problems, so if it’s not working there’s likely something else going on. First thing I’d check is whether your bot actually has permission to send media in the target channel. Even if text forwarding works, media permissions can be set separately. Also verify that the original message actually contains the media you think it does - sometimes messages that appear to have attachments are actually just embedded links. Another possibility is rate limiting. Telegram is much stricter about media uploads than text, so if you’re forwarding multiple messages quickly the media ones might be getting dropped while text goes through. Try adding a small delay between forwards to test this. If none of that helps, I’d recommend adding some error handling around your forward_message call to see what specific error you’re getting back from the API.
This sounds like a bot permissions issue specifically related to media handling. When I encountered something similar, it turned out my bot token didn’t have the necessary scope for media operations even though basic messaging worked fine. Double check that your bot was created with full permissions and that the target channel allows bots to post media content. Another thing worth investigating is the file size limits - Telegram has different restrictions for bots versus regular users, and larger media files often fail silently. You might also want to examine the incoming message object more closely to ensure the media is actually present in the expected format. Sometimes what looks like attached media is actually just a preview or link. Try logging the full message structure before attempting to forward it to see exactly what data you’re working with.
check if your bot has admin rights in the destination channel - thats usually the culprit when media forwarding fails but text works. also telegram sometimes blocks certain file types or sizes even if they look normal to you