My Client Lost Their Gallery Link

Before you reply to the client, know which of these two conversations you are having. The table separates the parts of a delivery that are simply waiting to be reopened from the one part that has a window.

Only live ZIPs occupy space, and replacing a ZIP frees the old one first, so putting a delivery back up for a client who lost it does not accumulate anything. Full-resolution delivery is a paid-plan feature and the check runs on the server, which is also why a closed window cannot be reopened by guessing at a URL.

You never have to reconstruct a link. Open your studio, find the gallery, copy its share link. That is the whole recovery procedure, and it works whether the client lost the link yesterday or last year.

There is one wrinkle worth knowing, because it makes an old message look wrong. Your galleries live at your own subdomain, in the form yourname.clientgallery.io. Subdomain provisioning is best-effort, so a share link can fall back to the form clientgallery.io/g/ followed by the gallery token until DNS settles. Both forms point at the same gallery.

So if a client forwards you the link they claim is broken and it does not look like the address you expect, that is very likely the explanation rather than a dead gallery. Send the current link from your studio and move on.

The client never needed an account to open the gallery in the first place, and they do not need one now. There is nothing for them to have been signed out of, no password reset to walk them through and no support ticket to file on their side. That matters more than it sounds, because most of the awkwardness in this situation comes from platforms where a client has a login they have forgotten.

A client who says the link does not work is often holding the link and missing the password. Passwords here are set per gallery, either in the studio or in the Lightroom Classic export dialog so the gallery goes live already password-set. If you sent the link and the password in two separate messages, the client may well have kept one and deleted the other.

The gate is enforced on the server, and it guards the files rather than only the page. Behind it sit the whole-gallery ZIP, the full-resolution download and, on galleries where you have turned it on, the face-search index. So a missing password is not a cosmetic problem for the client, it is the reason nothing downloads.

Ask one question before you do anything else: what do they actually see. A page asking for a password is a password problem. A page that does not load at all is a link problem. A gallery they can scroll but not download from is either a password problem or a full-resolution window that has closed. Those are three different fixes and guessing wastes a round trip.

This one is genuinely confusable and it comes up more than you would expect. When you organise a shoot into named sections, each section also has its own standalone share link. That page is view-only. It has no ZIP, no picks, no full-resolution download, no face search, and no link back to the parent gallery.

A client who was sent a section link is not lost at all. They are looking at a real page, at the correct photos, with none of the buttons they were told to use. From their side that is indistinguishable from a broken delivery, which is why they write to you saying the link does not work.

The fix is to send the gallery link. Inside the gallery, the client sees one scrolling page with a jump-to bar at the top for the sections, and every control is where it should be. Section links are useful for showing one part of a shoot to someone who should not have the rest, and they are the wrong thing to send as the delivery.

Here is the honest part. A client who lost the link usually never opened it. The email went to a promotions tab, or it arrived during the week they were away, and the message you are now getting is the first time they have looked for it. Treating that as a failure on your side is a habit worth breaking.

You do not have to guess. Every gallery tile in the studio carries an opened indicator telling you whether your client has opened that gallery, and the tiles filter by All, Seen by client and Not opened yet. Look at the tile before you write the apology.

If the tile says the gallery was never opened, the delivery message is what failed, not the gallery. Send it to them again from a different address or a different channel, and say in one line what they will find when they arrive. If the tile says it was opened, they had it and mislaid it, which is a different message and usually a shorter one.

Do not expect the account analytics to answer this question. They are account-wide rather than per gallery, so they tell you about visits, unique visitors, photo views, favourites, picks sent, ZIP downloads, shares, time spent and your device split across the whole account. The opened indicator on the tile is the per-client signal, and it is the one to use here.

Nothing on any platform stops a client losing a link. A studio that delivers galleries inside a chat thread that gets buried should expect to send them again, and no feature fixes that. What you can fix is the message, so that the next time they go looking they find it themselves.

A delivery message that survives has four properties. It is searchable, which means the subject line carries their name and the date of the shoot rather than the word Gallery. It is self-contained, which means the link and the password are in the same message. It is honest about time, which means it says plainly that the gallery stays up and that the full-resolution download is the part with a window. And it goes to an email address, because an email can be searched years later and a message in a social inbox often cannot.

Two smaller habits help. Send it to both partners rather than one, since the person who books is rarely the person who goes looking for the photos in year three. And when you republish the gallery from Lightroom Classic, remember that it keeps the same link, so the message you already sent stays correct. You are never invalidating an old email by pushing an update.

Some context for where this sits in the workflow: the link expiry answer covers what does and does not have a clock on it, and the photo delivery guide covers the handoff the link is part of.

Two cases where this page does not help you, stated plainly.

If what your client lost was a set of RAW files or a video master, no gallery link brings that back, here or anywhere. Uploads accept JPG and PNG. This is a delivery tool that hosts JPEGs, and it does not warehouse RAW files or master video. That is a real limitation and it is also what keeps the price flat. Masters belong on your own drives and your own backups, and if a client needs one, you send it from there.

And if the same client has now lost the same link three times, the tool is not the problem. Get their picks and their downloads done in one sitting while you are on the phone with them, then send the recap in writing afterwards. That is a workflow change, not a software purchase, and it works on every platform.

This page states no competitor figures. Every product statement on it describes clientgallery.io only, and each one was checked against the running product on 12 September 2026: the single plan at 10 $/month or 100 $/year with the first gallery free, hosted galleries staying live for as long as the account exists without being expired, hidden or archived, the full-resolution ZIP being live 3 days per upload and re-uploadable at any time, per-gallery passwords enforced on the server across the gallery ZIP and the full-resolution download, galleries served from your own subdomain with a fallback share-link form while DNS settles, section share links being view-only, the opened indicator and its All, Seen by client and Not opened yet filters, and the Lightroom Classic publish service keeping the same gallery link when you republish.