ShootProof and Slow Galleries: Diagnose the Cause Before You Move

Clients describe four distinct problems with the same sentence. Each one has a different cause and a different fix. Pin down which one you have before you touch anything.

Ask the client two questions: which of those it was, and on what device and network. That single reply ends a surprising number of these investigations.

This is the most common cause by a distance, and it deserves more of your attention than everything else on this page put together.

A gallery of 30 MB full resolution JPEGs will feel slow on any platform on earth. The arithmetic is not subtle. A thumbnail occupies a few hundred pixels on a screen. A camera original carries thousands of pixels in each direction, and file size grows roughly with area, so an image four times wider and taller carries something like sixteen times the data. Fill a phone screen with a dozen of those and the client is waiting on print files in order to look at postage stamps.

This is what proof compression exists for. A proof is a viewing copy: a smaller, re-compressed JPEG made for judging a photo on a screen, not for printing it. Every serious gallery platform makes proofs, because a browsing experience built on masters is not a browsing experience. The question is not whether proofs exist, it is what size of file your gallery is actually serving to the client, and that depends partly on what you handed it.

Check it yourself in one minute. Open your own gallery in a browser, right click a thumbnail, save it to your desktop, and look at the saved file. If it lands as a multi megabyte file with camera sized dimensions, you have your answer and nothing else on this page matters until it is fixed. Then do the same on a photo opened full screen, which is the file the client waits for when they click.

A wedding gallery of 800 frames on a single page is a different object from a portrait gallery of 60. Even with well sized proofs, the browser is being asked to fetch, decode and hold a great many images at once, and phones run out of patience before laptops do.

The mitigation is loading as you scroll, so the browser fetches only what is near the viewport. To check whether your gallery does that, open it and scroll quickly to the bottom. If you see placeholders that fill in behind you, images are loading as you go. If the page sat still for a long time and then arrived complete, it was not.

Either way, one enormous page is a design decision you can revisit. Splitting a large delivery into folders by part of the day, or by set, reduces what any single view has to load and, as a bonus, makes the gallery easier for the client to navigate.

The person complaining is usually on a phone, on cellular, somewhere with two bars, and never on your studio wifi. Your laptop on a wired connection is the least representative test rig available to you.

Their hardware matters too. An older phone decodes images more slowly and thermally throttles when asked to do a lot of it at once, which is why the gallery feels fine for thirty seconds and then crawls. So does their browser: content blockers and privacy extensions inspect and sometimes delay requests, and a browser carrying a few hundred open tabs has very little memory left for your photographs.

None of this is fixable by you, and none of it changes when you change platform. It is, however, worth identifying, because it stops you from paying to solve a problem that lives on someone else's device.

Data takes time to cross the world. A client three time zones away from where the files are stored waits longer than a client in the same city, and a client overseas waits longer again. This is why two people can open the same link on the same day and describe two different galleries.

You cannot control this and neither can any platform entirely, though serving files from locations near the viewer reduces it. Treat it as an explanation rather than a fault, and weight the complaint accordingly: one relative in another country having a slower time is not evidence about your gallery.

A slow download is a different problem with different causes, and it gets reported in exactly the same words.

Browsing moves viewing copies. Downloading moves the real files, and a full resolution delivery is measured in gigabytes. A 20 GB handoff on an ordinary home connection takes as long as it takes, and no platform can make the client's upstream provider faster. If the client was downloading, the fix is expectation setting and perhaps a smaller delivery, not a migration.

Ask directly: were you looking through the photos, or saving them? The answer sends you down two completely different roads.

A real test compares two galleries under conditions that resemble the client's, not yours.

• Use a phone, on cellular, with wifi switched off. Not studio wifi, not a laptop. Turning wifi off is the step people skip, and it invalidates everything after it.
• Test two galleries back to back. The one the client complained about, and a second one you build from the same shoot with much smaller exports. Same phone, same network, same ten minutes.
• Time the same action in each. From tapping the link to the first screen of thumbnails being fully visible, then opening one photo full screen.
• Note the file sizes you uploaded to each. That is the variable you changed, and it is usually the one that explains the difference.

If the smaller gallery is dramatically better, the problem was your export settings and it followed you to any platform you moved to. If both are equally slow on a good signal, you have learned something worth knowing about the platform, and you learned it with evidence rather than a hunch.

Three changes cost nothing and fix most of these complaints. Do them first, whatever you eventually decide.

• Export smaller proofs. Set a long edge and a quality level for client viewing copies instead of exporting full resolution out of habit. Save it as an export preset so it is not a decision you make again.
• Split a very large gallery into folders. Getting ready, ceremony, portraits, reception. Less to load per view, and a better browsing experience for the client than one endless scroll.
• Separate the full resolution handoff from browsing. Deliver the masters as their own package to the people who need them. Making every client load full resolution files in order to browse is the single most expensive habit in this whole workflow.

A migration costs you an afternoon at best, and it costs your clients their existing links. Spend the ten minutes first.

There are good reasons to leave a gallery platform. None of them are ones you would have to guess at, and all of them are structural rather than about speed.

• The pricing model no longer fits the work you do. You are paying by a meter that has nothing to do with the value you get from the tool.
• You are paying for a store you do not use. If you do not sell prints through the platform, an entire half of what you are buying is dead weight.
• A photo count is forcing you to split or delete galleries. When the plan's limits, and not the job, are deciding how you organise deliveries, the tool is running your studio.
• You want your own subdomain and no platform branding. Some studios care a great deal about the client never seeing a vendor's name. That is a legitimate reason to move, and it is verifiable in five seconds.

Notice what is not on that list. Move for a reason you can state plainly and check yourself, not for an impression of speed you have no way to confirm.

Since the pricing model is one of the honest reasons to move, here is what ShootProof publishes about its own, taken from its plans page on 9 September 2026.

Check those before you rely on them, because ShootProof's own two marketing pages disagreed on the two lowest paid tiers when both were fetched on 9 September 2026. The plans page listed the 1,500 plan at $9.99 a month and the pricing page listed it at $12.99. For the 5,000 plan the figures were $19.99 and $21.99. The 25,000 and Unlimited plans matched on both pages. We quote the plans page set above and say so plainly; a reader who opens the other page will see different numbers.

One figure is unambiguous and worth stating clearly, because it is a real strength. ShootProof takes no commission on print sales. Its help centre states, on 26 August 2026, that ShootProof will never take a commission, and its plans page markets commission free sales on every plan. The rate is 0%.

Its fees article, updated 2 March 2026, states that the only charges beyond the plan fee are archiving and credit card processing. That article does not publish the processing rate, so we do not know it and will not substitute a generic percentage for it. For the full ShootProof pricing picture, see our ShootProof alternative page.

If your studio runs on ShootProof's contracts, invoicing and print store, stay where you are. That is not a polite gesture, it is the correct advice.

E-sign contracts and invoicing are included on every paid ShootProof plan as published on its plans page on 9 September 2026, and print sales carry no commission. A studio that signs clients, bills them and sells prints inside one system is getting real value from that integration, and we do not offer any of it. clientgallery.io has no print store, no invoicing and no contracts. Replacing an integrated business system with a gallery is a downgrade for that studio, however the gallery performs.

The photographers who should look at us are the ones who deliver galleries and sell nothing through the platform, and who are therefore paying for half a product.

We will not hand you a benchmark, because we have not published a measurement with a method and a date and we are not going to imply one. What we can give you is the mechanism, which is the part that actually determines what your client experiences.

Photos uploaded to clientgallery.io are compressed in your browser into proof JPEGs of roughly 0.6 MB each before they are ever stored. The client's phone is therefore never asked to fetch a print file in order to draw a thumbnail. That is the whole trick, and it is the reason a gallery opens fast on a phone. It is also why we host JPEGs only: no RAW warehousing, no master video. That constraint is what keeps the price flat.

The rest, plainly:

• $10 a month or $100 a year. One plan. No print store, no commission, no per gallery fee, no storage tiers.
• Your own subdomain, no platform branding anywhere the client can see.
• Sub-galleries so a large delivery becomes folders, Face Search so guests find themselves, and a two way Lightroom Classic plugin that publishes proofs from your catalog and pulls the client's picks back into it.
• Hosted galleries never expire.

Fair use, stated in full so there are no surprises: 1,000 photos per gallery, 250 GB of proofs per paid account, and 5 GB on free accounts. Full resolution delivery works differently and deliberately: you upload a full resolution ZIP for a gallery, it stays live for 3 days per handoff, you can re-upload it any time, and each account holds up to 100 GB of standing ZIPs. That is a delivery mechanism, not permanent archival storage, and we would rather say so than let you discover it later.

• ShootProof plans page, plan tiers and prices, commission free sales, contracts and invoicing inclusion. https://www.shootproof.com/plans/ Fetched 9 September 2026.
• ShootProof pricing page, the conflicting figures for the 1,500 and 5,000 plans. https://www.shootproof.com/pricing Fetched 9 September 2026.
• ShootProof help centre, ShootProof FAQs, the commission statement. Article updated 26 August 2026. https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/360062280593-ShootProof-FAQs Fetched 9 September 2026.
• ShootProof help centre, Are there any other fees, the exhaustive fee list and the unpublished processing rate. Article updated 2 March 2026. https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008032267-Are-there-any-other-fees Fetched 9 September 2026.
• clientgallery.io pricing, proof compression and fair use figures. https://clientgallery.io/ Checked 9 September 2026.