picdrop Alternative: One Flat Plan Instead of a Storage Meter

Most gallery platforms treat a full plan as an upload problem. You hit the number, new uploads stop, you delete something or you upgrade. picdrop's published rule is broader than that.

The FAQ on how long galleries stay online says galleries stay online until they are deleted, and then adds the condition: "if the total amount of files or the number of galleries exceeds the amount included in your plan, the files or galleries can no longer be downloaded nor accessed by third parties".

Read that as a photographer rather than as a shopper. The link you emailed a client last spring is not a static object. It stays working because your account keeps clearing a bar every month. If a subscription lapses, or the archive grows past the tier, the client on the other end of that link does not get a message from you explaining a billing change. They get a gallery they can no longer open, and they call you about it.

The gallery count matters as much as the gigabytes. The free plan carries 1 GB and 3 galleries. Three galleries is one busy month for a working photographer, and the condition is written on the number of galleries as well as the volume of files.

This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a description of what a metered archive does over time. The bill tracks the amount of work you have already delivered, not the amount of work you are doing now.

A fair comparison starts with what you would be giving up.

• It exports client selections to editing software, on every plan. The pricing page lists "Export selections to Lightroom, Capture One, etc." on every tier including the free one. Anyone telling you picdrop has no path into Lightroom is wrong. It has one, and it is not gated.
• It does not touch your originals. picdrop states that if you enable the download of original images they will not carry watermarks, "because picdrop will never modify your originally uploaded images". For a photographer who delivers files that go on to a lab or a retoucher, a platform that promises not to re-encode anything is a real promise.
• Hosted in Germany. The pricing page states it. If you work for European clients, or under a contract that puts conditions on where files sit, that is not a marketing line, it is the deciding factor.
• No AI training on your data. picdrop states this on the same page. It is worth naming, because it is the kind of commitment a photographer should be asking every platform about.
• Team structure that is designed for teams. Advanced includes 2 team members and allows up to 4. Business includes 5 and allows up to 9. Enterprise starts at 10 or more. Collections sit above galleries: 10 on Advanced, unlimited on Business.
• Expiry dates from Pro up. A gallery can be given an expiration date, and picdrop describes the result precisely: the gallery is "automatically set to private, making it visible only to you and your team members". Nothing is destroyed. The feature is "exclusively available starting from the Pro plan tier".

Prices as printed on picdrop's pricing page on 3 September 2026, in US dollars. "Annual" is the per-month figure when billed for a year. "Not listed" means the pricing page does not list that item for that plan.

The bottom row has no row above it. There is no larger plan to move to, because the fair-use figures are printed rather than sold as an upgrade.

A flat price with no storage ladder only works if the platform is not warehousing the heaviest files a photographer produces. clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video. That is the trade, and it is the whole reason the number stays at $10 a month.

Here is what that means in figures rather than adjectives.

• Proofs. Photos you upload are browser-compressed proof JPEGs of about 0.6 MB each, hosted for as long as the account exists. The fair-use ceilings are 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account, which is hundreds of thousands of photos. Free accounts hold 5 GB.
• Full-resolution delivery. This is a paid feature and it works per gallery. You upload a full-resolution ZIP for a gallery, it stays live for 3 days per handoff, and you can re-upload it any time the client needs it again. There is 100 GB of standing ZIPs per account.
• Hosted galleries never expire. A link you sent three years ago still opens. There is no tier for it to fall out of.
• No platform branding anywhere on client-facing pages, at any price, on your studio's own subdomain.
• No print store, no commissions, no per-gallery fees, no storage tiers. Clients download the whole gallery in one click, or any single image.
• Sub-galleries inside a gallery, so a wedding can carry getting ready, ceremony and reception as folders in one link instead of three links.
• Face Search included, so a guest at an event can find their own photos in a large gallery without you filtering by hand.

The honest way to compare the two shapes: picdrop separates the heavy archive question by charging for it, and clientgallery.io separates it by not taking the heavy files at all. If your masters need to live on the platform, picdrop's terabytes are the answer and this page is not.

This is the part most comparisons get wrong, so it is worth stating carefully. picdrop does have a Lightroom path. Its pricing page lists "Export selections to Lightroom, Capture One, etc." on every plan, free included. The difference is not whether a path exists. It is the direction of travel and where the picks land.

picdrop exports the selection. You take that export and bring it into your editing software, and the result is a set you then have to reconcile with the catalog you were already working in.

clientgallery.io's Lightroom Classic plugin runs the loop in both directions. You publish proofs out of the catalog, and when the client is done you pull their picks back in. The picks arrive as star ratings, pick flags and colour labels on the images that are already in your catalog, plus a collection named after the gallery, matched by filename. There is no import step and no second copy of anything. The Lightroom workflow guide walks the whole round trip.

Whether that is worth switching for depends entirely on how you cull. If you already sort by flags and labels inside the catalog, having the client's answer arrive in that same vocabulary removes a manual step from every job. If you cull somewhere else, the export picdrop already gives you is enough and this difference is not your reason to move.

picdrop's deliberate expiry feature is well behaved. From Pro up you can set an expiration date, and the gallery is "automatically set to private, making it visible only to you and your team members". Nothing is deleted, and you chose it. That is a good design.

The problem is the involuntary version of the same outcome. A gallery going private because you set a date is a decision. A gallery becoming inaccessible because the account crossed a storage number is an accident, and it lands on the client rather than on you.

For a proofing tool used inside a production week, that risk is small, because the gallery has done its job by Friday. For delivery, where the link is expected to work for years and is often the only copy a client can find, it is the whole question. If you are weighing proofing against delivery, the client photo proofing guide and the photo delivery guide separate the two jobs properly.

A flat single-user plan is the wrong answer for a lot of readers. Stay on picdrop if any of these describe you.

• Your files have to stay in Germany. picdrop states "Hosted in Germany" on its pricing page. clientgallery.io does not publish a data-residency guarantee. If a client contract or an internal policy puts a condition on where files sit, that condition settles the question and nothing else on this page matters.
• Work passes between people before it reaches the client. A retoucher hands to an editor, the editor hands to an art director, and each of them needs their own login and their own view of the same job. picdrop includes 2 team members on Advanced and up to 4, and 5 on Business and up to 9. clientgallery.io has no team seats. A studio that runs a pipeline should not try to fake it with a shared login.
• You need collections above galleries. Advanced carries 10 collections and Business carries unlimited. If you organise by campaign or by client account with many shoots underneath, that structure is real work picdrop has already done. Sub-galleries organise a single shoot, which is a smaller idea.
• The platform is your working archive for masters. 1 TB on Advanced and 3 TB on Business are there to hold heavy files, and picdrop never modifies your originals. clientgallery.io hosts JPEG proofs and delivers full-resolution files as a ZIP that is live for 3 days per handoff. Those are different products.
• Selections into Capture One matter more than selections into Lightroom. picdrop exports to both. The clientgallery.io plugin is Lightroom Classic.

If none of those describe you, and what you actually do is shoot, cull in Lightroom, and hand finished JPEG galleries to clients under your own name, then the storage ladder is the only thing your subscription is buying, and the ceiling is a liability sitting under every link you have ever sent.

All picdrop figures and quotes on this page were fetched from the pages below on 3 September 2026. Prices are the US dollar figures shown on the pricing page that day.

• picdrop pricing (plans, storage, galleries, collections, team members, branding, selection export, hosting and AI statements), fetched 3 September 2026, https://www.picdrop.com/web/pricing
• picdrop FAQ: How long will my galleries stay online, fetched 3 September 2026, https://www.picdrop.com/web/faq/how-long-will-my-galleries-stay-online
• picdrop FAQ: Can I set an expiration date for galleries, fetched 3 September 2026, https://www.picdrop.com/web/faq/can-i-set-an-expiration-date-for-galleries
• picdrop FAQ: Using picdrop (watermarks and original files), fetched 3 September 2026, https://www.picdrop.com/web/faq/using-picdrop
• clientgallery.io pricing and fair-use figures, verified in the product the same day, fetched 3 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/