Embodiments are provided for ephemeral eventing. Ephemeral eventing may involve sending metadata portions associated with content items from a user device to a content management system prior to uploading the content portions of the content items. The content management system may then assign the content items to one or more events. The event assignments may then be sent back to the user device, allowing the content items to be locally displayed according to their events as if the content items had already been uploaded to the content management system.