PhotoShelter Alternative: What It Costs and When to Stay

PhotoShelter sells PhotoShelter for Photographers and PhotoShelter for Brands. They are priced on separate pages and aimed at separate buyers. The Photographers product publishes three plans with prices on the page. The Brands product publishes five plan names, a storage figure and a seat count for each, and no dollar amount anywhere: every button on that page reads "Get Pricing".

Both are library products. PhotoShelter's supported file types article lists JPG and TIFF as its recommended formats and documents RAW, PSD, DNG, PDF, SVG, EPS, GIF, HEIF/HEIC, PNG and HDR with per-format caveats, which tells you what it is built to hold: originals, not just the JPEGs a client looks at. Storage is metered in gigabytes and terabytes, never in a photo count. Around that library sit keyword and metadata search, download permissions, outbound FTP and a store that takes a cut of what you sell.

clientgallery.io does none of that. It hosts JPEG proofs, collects client picks, and hands over finished files. There is no print store, no licensing workflow, no RAW warehousing and no commission on anything, because there is nothing to take a commission from. If you are comparing the two, compare them as different categories that happen to overlap on the words "client gallery".

This is the honest part. If one of the following describes your work, nothing further down this page should move you, and switching would cost you a capability we do not have.

• You need a permanent, searchable archive. PhotoShelter is built to be the place your whole body of work lives, with heavy metadata and keyword search over it. clientgallery.io is built around individual jobs. It is not an archive of everything you have ever shot, and it does not warehouse RAW files.
• You sell through the platform. PhotoShelter has a store, fulfilment and a documented fee structure. We have no store at all. If print or licensing revenue runs through your gallery, leaving PhotoShelter means rebuilding that revenue somewhere else.
• You need FTP. PhotoShelter documents outbound transfer over "FTP, FTPS (FTP w/support for TLS/SSL), sFTP (secure FTP), scp (secure copy)", to several destinations at once, and can convert originals to JPEG on the way out. Agencies, wire desks and publications often require exactly that. We do not offer it.
• You work for a brand with a shared library. The Brands product lists library seats per plan, from 2 on Starter up to 5 on Premium and Custom on Enterprise, with unlimited invited users and contributors. A marketing team that needs named seats and a governed library is the buyer that product was designed for.
• You deliver originals in formats we do not host. TIFF, PSD, DNG and RAW are all listed as supported file types on PhotoShelter. We host JPEG proofs and hand over full-resolution files as a ZIP.

One more thing to be straight about, since it is the sort of detail that gets discovered after a migration: clientgallery.io has no seat model at all. There are no multi-user accounts, no roles and no separate login for an assistant or a second shooter. A two-person studio shares one account. PhotoShelter for Photographers is not per-seat either, but it does give each plan a single defined user, and the Brands product is explicitly built around library seats. If named logins matter to you, we are the wrong tool.

PhotoShelter's Photographers page shows a monthly figure with the annual total beside it. The page uses a dollar sign and does not print a currency code, so the currency is left as published below. The monthly-billing rate behind the page's toggle is not reproduced here, because it was not captured on the page as fetched.

Two things to read off that table. PhotoShelter's entry plan and our only plan carry the same headline number, and they buy very different things: 4 GB of library against galleries and proofing with the fair-use ceilings described below. And PhotoShelter's price scales with bytes, while ours does not scale at all.

A cap is not a limit you hit once. It is a cost curve. Every shoot you keep adds to the same meter, so the question is not whether 100 GB is enough today but what happens in the third year of filling it. On PhotoShelter the answer is the next plan: 4 GB to 100 GB is $120 to $300 a year as published, and 100 GB to 500 GB is $300 to $540.

There is a middle path documented in PhotoShelter's help centre, in an article last updated on 8 October 2019, which describes buying extra storage in blocks: PhotoShelter states "an extra 10GB for $5/month, all the way up to 1TB for $1,000/year", and that "Starter account holders may not take advantage of this option". That article is seven years old, so treat it as PhotoShelter's published position rather than as today's rate card, and confirm it with support before planning around it. The per-plan caps in the table are from the live pricing page and are the safer numbers.

Our side of that comparison has to be just as concrete, because "unlimited" without numbers is marketing. clientgallery.io sells unlimited galleries, photos and clients under fair use, and the fair use is written down: 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account, with 5 GB on a free account. Uploaded photos are compressed in the browser into proof JPEGs before they are hosted, which is why 250 GB holds hundreds of thousands of images rather than a few thousand. Hosted galleries do not expire while the account exists.

Full-resolution delivery is a separate, deliberate mechanism rather than part of that pool. You upload a full-resolution ZIP for a gallery, it stays live for three days per handoff, and you can re-upload it any time the client needs it again, within 100 GB of standing ZIPs per account. That is a handoff, not a vault. We do not keep your masters and you should not treat any gallery tool as your backup.

This is the clearest single difference in the running cost of the two products. PhotoShelter's pricing page states, in its FAQ, "we charge a sales transaction fee between 8% and 10% depending on your account tier". Its help centre puts numbers on each tier: PhotoShelter states "Basic: 10%, Standard: 9%, Pro: 8%", that the fee is charged "on the total amount of each sale, minus any shipping or tax", that it "applies to all orders, including self-fulfilled orders", and that it is assessed at the time of the sale and added to the next month's statement.

Read the self-fulfilled line twice. It means the fee is not only a lab fee. If you print the order yourself and ship it yourself, the percentage still applies, and it sits on top of the subscription and on top of whatever your payment provider charges you.

clientgallery.io charges no commission, because it has no store. That is a saving only if you were not selling through the gallery in the first place. A photographer whose print revenue is real is buying an engine on PhotoShelter and often earning the fee back many times over. A portrait or wedding studio that invoices its packages separately and only needs to deliver files is paying a percentage on a business line it does not run, or is paying for a storefront it never opens.

PhotoShelter's client access is built like a library's. It states three options for download permissions: create a password, grant access to specific people with a login required, or grant access to anyone for anonymous downloads. Expiration dates and download limits are available, clients receive the size you select plus any smaller options, and "Original file" is the largest choice. Visibility is set separately as "Everyone", "Those with permission" or "No one but me". Clients can also select images and download them as a zip. For anyone who watermarks, PhotoShelter documents a free low-resolution comp as a "500-pixel image with a watermark".

That is a lot of control, and it is the right amount of control when the same library serves an agency, a licensing buyer and a print customer at once. It is more than a portrait client needs. Our model is a gallery on your own subdomain with no platform branding on it, an optional password for the gallery, and picks the client marks as they scroll. Proofs are sized for fast viewing, and the full-resolution file travels in the separate ZIP handoff described above. Downloads can be switched off entirely by the studio. If you sell downloads, you paste your own payment link into the gallery and enable downloads yourself once you are paid; nothing unlocks automatically.

On the studio side, the parts that save the most time are the two-way Lightroom Classic plugin, which publishes proofs from the catalog and pulls the client's picks back into it, and in-browser Face Search, which is off by default and enabled per gallery: a guest's selfie is matched to their photos on their own device and is never uploaded.

If you decide to move, know the shape of the job before you start. PhotoShelter documents outbound transfer over FTP, FTPS, sFTP and scp, to several destinations at once, with an option to convert originals to JPEG on the way out, and it documents clients downloading selected images as a zip. Those are the two documented routes out. There is no reason to describe either as a one-click account export, and this page does not claim PhotoShelter traps your files.

On our side, be equally clear: clientgallery.io has no PhotoShelter import. The one-click whole-account import reads Pixieset, not PhotoShelter. Moving from PhotoShelter means pulling your files down and uploading the galleries you still need, which in practice is the active jobs, not everything you have ever shot. Your masters stay on your own drives and in your own backup, where they belonged anyway.

That is also the honest summary of the whole comparison. If PhotoShelter is your archive, do not replace it with a delivery tool. If PhotoShelter is where your archive happens to sit because you signed up for client galleries years ago, the archive is the part that needs a real home, and the galleries are the part that can move to a flat 10 $ a month.

Every figure, quote and policy above traces to one of these, fetched 23 September 2026.

• PhotoShelter for Photographers pricing (plan prices, storage, users, custom domain and proofing rows, transaction-fee FAQ): go.photoshelter.com/photographers/ (fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter for Brands pricing (plan names, storage, library seats, "Get Pricing" buttons): go.photoshelter.com/brands/pricing/ (fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter help centre, Self-Fulfilled Prints & Products (8, 9 and 10 percent by tier; applies to self-fulfilled orders): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203373140 (article updated 4 June 2024, fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter help centre, Upgrading and Adding Storage (extra-storage blocks): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203373760 (article updated 8 October 2019, fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter help centre, Gallery and Collection Access: Who Can Download Your Images (three permission options, expiry, download limits, Original file): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203374400 (article updated 21 May 2025, fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter help centre, Managing Visibility and Download Permissions (Everyone, Those with permission, No one but me): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203374470 (article updated 21 May 2025, fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter help centre, Low-Resolution Comp Downloads (500-pixel watermarked comp): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203375240 (article updated 11 February 2020, fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter help centre, Exporting Images via Outbound FTP (FTPS, sFTP, JPEG conversion, multiple destinations): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203374490 (article updated 10 November 2025, fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter help centre, Viewing and Downloading Images for Clients (client zip download): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037537394 (article updated 12 November 2019, fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter help centre, Supported File Types (JPG and TIFF recommended; RAW, PSD, DNG, PDF, SVG, EPS, GIF, HEIF/HEIC, PNG and HDR with caveats): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203373520 (article updated 28 July 2026, fetched 23 September 2026)

clientgallery.io prices, fair-use ceilings and ZIP handoff limits are our own published terms, not third-party figures.