Do I Need a Client Gallery Platform?

Below roughly two paid shoots a month, stay with the folder. That number is a rule of thumb drawn from when the five failures below start showing up, not a measured statistic, and you should treat it as one.

A shared folder is the right tool when all of the following are true:

• The client is not choosing anything. You deliver a finished set and the job ends.
• You do not need to know whether the link was opened, or when.
• Nobody else shoots alongside you, so there is one set of files from one card.
• The folder contains only frames you deliberately put there.
• Your client is comfortable with a file browser and does not need to enjoy the experience.

If those five hold, buy nothing. Four weddings a year does not justify a recurring bill, and a photographer who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The failures start when one of them stops being true. They rarely arrive together. They arrive one at a time, and the first one usually arrives during the picking.

1. The client who cannot pick without a spreadsheet. This is almost always the first break. The moment a client has to tell you which images they want, a folder gives them no way to say it except by reading filenames back to you. You get an email listing IMG_4417, IMG_4418 and "the one where she is laughing." You then retype that list into your editing software by hand. Two clients doing this at once is the point where most photographers start searching for a gallery.

2. The link that expires before the client opens it. On Dropbox, password protection, link expiry and disabling downloads are documented as features for customers on the paid plans, and the free Basic plan is not on that list. So a photographer on free Dropbox cannot put a password on a delivery link at all. On Google Drive the expiry control is documented as "only available for eligible work or school accounts," which means a personal Gmail address cannot time-limit a delivery either. When you do have expiry, Dropbox states the link expires at 11:59 pm on the day you choose, in your time zone, and a client who opens their email a day late finds nothing.

3. The folder that shows your file naming and your outtakes. A folder is a view into your working disk, and it looks like one. The client sees your sequential filenames, your date-stamped subfolders, and whatever you forgot to remove. They also see nothing of you: no studio name, no design, nothing that reads as a finished product they paid for. The delivery is the last thing the client experiences before they recommend you, and a directory listing is a weak last impression.

4. The delivery you cannot tell whether anyone opened. With a folder you find out the client never got the files when they email you three weeks later asking where the photos are. There is no signal in between. That silence is tolerable across four jobs a year and it becomes a scheduling problem across forty, because you cannot tell the difference between a client who is slow and a client whose link went to spam.

5. The second shooter's files that have nowhere to go. As soon as someone else is shooting with you, the single-folder model stops describing reality. You get a second card, a different filename convention, and a decision about whether the client sees two folders or you spend an evening merging them. The same thing happens with a repeat client who now has three shoots with you and one flat folder for all of them.

Below are the figures each vendor prints on its own page. The Dropbox and Google numbers are Canadian storefront prices in CAD, because that is the storefront that was served when they were fetched. They are not converted and they are not relabelled. Monthly billing only, because the annual figures did not verify cleanly and are therefore not published here.

Read that table honestly and the drive wins on raw capacity. CA$12.99 buys 2 TB on Dropbox Plus. Ten dollars here buys 250 GB of proofs. If what you need is capacity, the drive is the better purchase and you should make it.

The comparison above is not like for like, and pretending it is would be dishonest. A cloud drive sells you a warehouse. A gallery sells you a presentation surface with a job attached: show the work, let the client choose, tell you what they chose, hand over the finals cleanly.

Those are different products, and the cheaper one does not do the job. Two terabytes of storage will not tell you which frame the client wants retouched. Fifteen gigabytes of free Google quota does not put your studio name above the photos. Buying more capacity has never once fixed the spreadsheet problem.

Drives are genuinely better at some things and it is worth saying which. Dropbox documents a maximum file size of 2 TB, and Google Drive documents up to 5 TB for any non-Google-format file. If you need to move a single enormous original to a retoucher, a drive is the right tool. clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs and does not warehouse RAW, which is one of the reasons the price stays flat. If your actual requirement is a RAW archive, buy the drive and do not expect a gallery to replace it.

Plenty of working photographers pay for both, and that is a reasonable outcome rather than a failure. The drive holds the masters. The gallery is what the client sees.

One more thing worth knowing if you are considering Google Photos as the delivery surface. Google documents that photos backed up in Original quality and in Storage saver both count toward your account storage, so the old free-unlimited arrangement is gone. Google also states that in Storage saver a photo larger than 16 MP will be resized to 16 MP, and that photos uploaded in Storage saver may be compressed into a different image format such as a .jpg. It is a consumer library being borrowed for professional delivery, and its sharing article documents no password and no expiry for an album link.

The useful threshold is not a storage number. It is how many times per month you personally absorb the friction. Three questions settle it faster than any pricing page.

How many times in the last three months did a client send you a list of filenames? If the answer is zero, stop reading and keep the folder. If it is more than three, you are already paying for a gallery in evenings, just not in money.

How many times did you re-send a delivery link? Re-sending is the symptom of a link that expired, went to spam, or was opened on a phone by someone who could not work out how to download a folder. Once is bad luck. Monthly is a pattern.

How many people other than you produced files for a job? The second shooter, the assistant with the detail shots, the video person grabbing stills. Each one adds a merge step that a folder does not help with.

Two paid shoots a month is where those three questions usually start answering themselves. It is not a law. A single photographer doing one complicated commercial job a month with an art director and three rounds of selects crosses the line sooner than someone shooting six simple family sessions.

Once you have decided you need one, the thing to check is what the price does as you grow. Per-gallery fees, commissions on client purchases, and storage tiers all mean the bill rises exactly when the year gets busy. A flat price does not.

clientgallery.io is one plan at $10 a month, or $100 a year. There is no print store, no commission on anything, no per-gallery fee and no storage tiers. Galleries, photos and clients are unlimited under fair use, with ceilings that exist as abuse tripwires: 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account, which is hundreds of thousands of images. Free accounts hold 5 GB.

Uploaded photos become browser-compressed proof JPEGs of about 0.6 MB each, sized for fast viewing and hosted for as long as the account exists. Full-resolution delivery works differently on purpose: you upload one full-resolution ZIP per gallery, it stays live for three days per handoff, and you can re-upload it any time the client needs it again, with 100 GB of standing ZIPs per account. That is a deliberate design choice rather than an oversight, and it is why the price is flat.

The features that map directly onto the five breaks above: galleries live on your own subdomain with no platform branding anywhere a client can see, clients mark their picks in the gallery instead of typing filenames, a two-way Lightroom Classic plugin publishes proofs from your catalog and pulls the picks back in, sub-galleries let one gallery hold several shoots or several shooters, and Face Search lets a guest find themselves without you sorting by hand.

And to repeat the part most pages leave out: if you shoot four jobs a year and nobody is choosing anything, none of that is worth $120 a year to you. Come back when the second break shows up.

• Dropbox Plans and Pricing, https://www.dropbox.com/plans, fetched 11 September 2026 (Canadian storefront, monthly billing).
• Dropbox, Set shared link permissions, https://help.dropbox.com/share/set-link-permissions, fetched 11 September 2026.
• Dropbox, Upload limitations, https://help.dropbox.com/sync/upload-limitations, fetched 11 September 2026.
• Google One plans, https://one.google.com/about/plans, fetched 11 September 2026 (Canadian storefront, monthly billing).
• Google Workspace pricing, https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html, fetched 11 September 2026 (regular non-promotional per-user monthly rates, CAD).
• Google Drive, Files you can store in Google Drive, https://support.google.com/drive/answer/37603, fetched 11 September 2026.
• Google Drive, Share files from Google Drive, https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2494822, fetched 11 September 2026.
• Google Photos, Choose the backup quality of your photos and videos, https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791, fetched 11 September 2026.
• Google Photos, Share photos & videos, https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6131416, fetched 11 September 2026.
• clientgallery.io plan, limits and features, https://clientgallery.io/, figures verified in the product code on 2 September 2026.