Can Clients Download All Photos at Once?

The whole-gallery button produces one ZIP file containing every proof in the gallery. The files inside are numbered in the order the photos appear, so the archive unpacks in your sequence rather than in whatever order a file system felt like. That matters more than it sounds: a wedding that was arranged getting-ready first, ceremony second, reception last still reads in that order on the client's desktop.

Proofs are web JPEGs, compressed in the browser on the way in, at roughly 0.6 MB each. They are the same files the client has been looking at in the gallery. They are correct for sharing, for a phone, for social, for sending to family, and for anything that lives on a screen. They are not the files you would hand a printer.

The single-image download is the same thing at a scale of one. The client taps a photo and takes it. No selection mode, no cart, no account.

Because proofs sit at roughly 0.6 MB, the size of the whole-gallery ZIP is predictable from the photo count alone. This is arithmetic, not a measurement.

There are two different downloads in this product and they behave differently on purpose. Confusing them is how a client ends up printing a web JPEG at sixteen by twenty inches.

Read the fourth row twice. The full-resolution link is a handoff with a three-day window, not a permanent library, and this page will not tell you otherwise. Replacing a ZIP frees the space of the old one first, so a studio that re-issues a delivery does not slowly fill its own pool. If a client comes back next year asking for the masters again, you re-upload and send a fresh link. That is the intended path, not a workaround.

If the full-resolution side is the part you are actually researching, the full-resolution delivery guide works through the export settings and the timing of that handoff properly.

Most clients open your link on a phone. A phone is a fine machine for taking three favourite images and a poor machine for taking five hundred, and pretending otherwise creates a support email you have to answer on a Sunday.

On iOS the ZIP lands in Files rather than in the camera roll. The client taps it there to unpack it, and the photos become a folder of JPEGs that they then have to add to Photos if that is where they want them. On Android the archive goes to the Downloads folder and needs a file manager to open. Neither is difficult. Both are one more step than a client expects, and the step happens after the download has already finished, which is where the confusion lives.

Free space is the real constraint. Unpacking an archive needs room for both the ZIP and the extracted folder at the same time, so a 600 MB gallery briefly wants closer to 1.2 GB. A phone sitting near full will fail partway through and give the client a message that says nothing useful about why.

So here is the honest advice, and it is worth putting in your delivery email in your own words. A client on a phone should download the handful of images they actually want right now, one at a time, and take the whole gallery later on a computer. Single images go straight down with none of the unpacking problem. The gallery is not going anywhere, because hosted galleries stay live for as long as the account exists, so there is no rush and no expiry to beat. If a download has already gone wrong for someone, the page on downloads that fail walks through the causes in order.

Downloads are a setting on your side, not a fact of nature, and there are two legitimate reasons to switch them off.

The invoice is still open. You can switch downloads off until you have been paid. Paste your own payment link and a Pay your invoice button appears beside the download, so the client sees the two things next to each other and knows exactly what unlocks what. Be clear about the mechanics: the unlock is manual. Nothing unlocks by itself when the money arrives. You see the payment, you switch downloads on. That is a deliberate choice rather than a missing feature, but you should know it before you go to bed expecting a gallery to open itself at two in the morning.

The gallery is private. A password on a gallery gates the files, not just the page. The whole-gallery ZIP, the full-resolution download and the face-search index all sit behind the same server-side gate, so a shared link on its own gets nobody in. You can set the password in the studio, or in the Lightroom Classic export dialog so the gallery goes live already password-set.

There is a third case that catches people out, and it is not a setting at all. A section inside a gallery has its own standalone share link, and that page is view-only. No ZIP, no picks, no full-resolution download, no face search. If a client tells you there is no download button, check which of the two links you sent. The gallery link is the one that downloads. Send that one.

You do not have to ask. ZIP downloads are one of the figures the studio reports, along with gallery visits, unique visitors, photo views, favourites, picks sent, shares, time spent and the device split between mobile, desktop and tablet. Those numbers are account-wide rather than per gallery, so read them as the shape of your delivery business rather than as a report card on one wedding.

For the single gallery in front of you, every tile in the studio carries an opened indicator telling you whether that client has opened it, with All, Seen by client and Not opened yet filters. That answers the question you actually have, which is usually whether the link arrived at all.

The iOS app sends a push notification when a client downloads the full-resolution ZIP, and a separate one when a client sends their picks, each with its own switch. The full-resolution notification is the useful one for delivery, because it tells you the three-day window was used before it closed.

Three cases where you should do something other than buy this, stated plainly.

You deliver RAW files or video. Uploads accept JPG and PNG. No RAW, no video. A flat price works precisely because this hosts web JPEGs and does not warehouse master files. If your deliverable is a folder of camera negatives or a set of graded clips, use a general file-transfer service for that part of the job.

Your revenue runs through print sales. There is no print store and no commission here, which is excellent if you sell prints elsewhere and irrelevant if the gallery is supposed to be your storefront. A studio whose income depends on a storefront attached to the gallery should stay on a platform that has one.

You want the masters online permanently. Proofs stay up as long as the account exists, and the full-resolution ZIP does not. Three days per handoff, with a re-upload button. If your promise to clients is that their originals live on a link forever, this product does not keep that promise, and you should not make it on our behalf. Your own drives and your own backups are where masters belong. The photo delivery guide covers the whole workflow around that division.

This page states no external or competitor figures. Every number and behaviour above is a clientgallery.io plan or fair-use figure checked in the running product on 12 September 2026: the whole-gallery ZIP of every proof numbered in order and the single-image download, with no client account at any point; the server-side password gate covering the ZIP, the full-resolution download and the face-search index; proofs as browser-compressed JPEGs of roughly 0.6 MB each; 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account; the studio-uploaded full-resolution ZIP, live 3 days per handoff, re-uploadable at any time, with 100 GB of standing ZIPs per account; hosted galleries staying live for as long as the account exists; downloads switchable off with a manual unlock beside your own payment link; and the account-wide studio figures including ZIP downloads. The ZIP sizes in the first table are arithmetic from the proof size, not measurements.