My Client Cannot Download the Gallery

Read this table before you touch a setting. It tells you which of the two your client is actually talking about, and that alone resolves a good share of these messages.

The last row is the whole page in miniature. If your client can see the photos but the download does nothing, look at your settings. If your client had the files last week and cannot get them today, look at the handoff window.

Work down this list. In practice you will stop at the first or second row.

Downloads can be switched off per gallery. That is a real setting with a real purpose, and the purpose is usually money. You paste your own payment link, a "Pay your invoice" button appears beside the download, and the client can look at every photo while the files stay closed until the invoice is settled.

Here is the part that produces the support message. The unlock is manual. There is no payment webhook, and nothing opens by itself when a client pays. Your client pays on a Friday evening, goes straight back to the gallery, finds the same closed download, and writes to you convinced something is broken. Nothing is broken. You have not flipped the switch yet.

That is worth deciding about rather than tripping over. If you hold files for payment, say so in the gallery's welcome note and tell the client you will open the download once you see the payment. One sentence up front removes the entire category of message. If you do not hold files for payment, leave downloads on and this cause disappears.

The full-resolution ZIP is a handoff, not a library. You build it, you upload it, and the client's link is live for 3 days per handoff. A client who bookmarks the gallery and comes back in week three will find the proofs exactly where they left them and the full-resolution download gone.

The fix takes a minute. Re-upload the ZIP. That starts a fresh handoff with a fresh window, and replacing a ZIP frees the old one's space before the new one lands, so a re-upload does not quietly cost you twice. Only live ZIPs count against the 100 GB of standing full-resolution ZIPs on the account.

Be honest with clients about the shape of this. The hosted gallery of proofs stays up for as long as your account exists, and that is the durable half of the delivery. The full-resolution files are a window, not a permanent archive, and a client who is told that once will download promptly instead of leaving it for a month. If your clients genuinely need the master files available at any moment forever, no delivery tool should be your archive. That belongs on your own drives and your own backups.

The mechanics of putting both halves behind one link are worked through in the guide on the gallery and the full-resolution ZIP.

This is the cause nobody checks, and it is the one that wastes the most time on both sides.

A large shoot is organised in the studio into named sections: ceremony, reception, portraits. Your client never navigates those. They get one scrolling page with a jump-to bar at the top, and every download in the table above works normally on it.

A section also has its own standalone share link, which exists so you can send one part of a shoot to one person. That page is view-only. It has no ZIP, no picks, no full-resolution download and no face search, and it carries no link back to the parent gallery. A client holding that link sees beautiful photos and no way to take them, and has no route from there to the page that would let them.

So the very first thing to check is which link you actually sent, or which link got forwarded. Assistants forward section links. Group chats forward section links. The fix is to send the gallery link, and the symptom disappears in one message. If the client genuinely only needs that one section, send the gallery link anyway and tell them which heading to jump to.

A password on a gallery is set per gallery, either in the studio or in the Lightroom Classic export dialog so the gallery goes live already password-set. The gate is server-side and it guards more than the page. It guards the whole-gallery ZIP, the full-resolution download and the face-search index.

That matters here because it kills a workaround clients try on their own. A client who has a direct file link but never entered the password does not get the file. Nothing slips past the gate, which is the point of having one, and it also means a stale link forwarded to a third party is not a hole in your delivery.

The practical failure is much duller than that. The password was in a different email from the link, the client only kept one of the two, and they are now stuck on a prompt they cannot answer. Put the password in the same message as the link. If you do not need a password on a particular gallery, do not set one, because every gate you add is a gate someone will be locked out of.

Two causes are on the client's side, and you can only diagnose them by asking.

A phone with no room. A full-resolution ZIP from a wedding is large. Phones run out of space, and a download that stops partway looks identical to a download that was blocked. The whole-gallery proof ZIP is far smaller, because proofs are browser-compressed JPEGs of roughly 0.6 MB each, so a client on a phone will often get the proofs without trouble and fail on the full-resolution file. Ask which one they tried. Recommend a computer for the full-resolution ZIP, every time.

A corporate or school network. Managed networks block large ZIP downloads, and they do it silently. The tell is location: it works at home and does nothing at the office. Ask the client to try from home or from a phone on mobile data before you spend an hour on anything else.

Both of these are worth asking about early precisely because they are not yours to fix. An hour spent re-uploading a file that was never the problem is an hour lost.

In order, and stop as soon as one of them answers the question.

One. Ask which download they mean: all the photos from the gallery page, or the full-resolution ZIP you sent. Those are the two different things from the first table.

Two. Ask them to paste back the exact link they are on. If it is a section link, you are done. Send the gallery link.

Three. Open the gallery in the studio and look at the download switch. If it is off, and the invoice is paid, switch it on. Nothing does that for you.

Four. If the gallery has a password, resend the link and the password in the same message.

Five. If it is the full-resolution ZIP, re-upload it. That is a new handoff with a new three-day window.

Six. If all of that is clean, it is their phone or their network. Ask them to try on a computer, at home.

One more signal is worth knowing about. Every gallery tile in the studio carries an indicator telling you whether your client has opened that gallery, with All, Seen by client and Not opened yet filters. If the tile says the gallery was never opened, the download was never the problem. The link never arrived, or it landed in a spam folder, and you are debugging the wrong half of the delivery. The broader workflow around all of this is covered in the photo delivery guide, and the plain question of what the client can take away in one click is answered in can clients download all the photos at once.

This page states no external figures, so there is nothing to cite from another platform. Every product fact above is a clientgallery.io behaviour checked in the running product on 12 September 2026: the whole-gallery proof ZIP with no client account at any point, the per-gallery download switch and the manual unlock beside your own payment link, the full-resolution handoff whose link is live for 3 days per handoff with re-upload freeing the replaced ZIP first, the 100 GB ceiling on standing full-resolution ZIPs, the server-side password gate covering the whole-gallery ZIP and the full-resolution download, the view-only section share link with no ZIP and no link to the parent gallery, and the opened indicator with its All, Seen by client and Not opened yet filters. Proof sizes of roughly 0.6 MB are the compression figure used across these pages. The plan is 10 $/month or 100 $/year, and the first gallery is free.