Answer
How Long Do Client Photo Galleries Stay Online?
On every major gallery platform, a client gallery stays online for as long as the photographer keeps paying and has not set an expiry date on it. Expiry is opt-in.
Updated 2026-09-07
A client photo gallery stays online for as long as the photographer's subscription is active and the photographer has not put an expiry date on it. On Pixieset, Pic-Time and CloudSpot, expiry is a setting the photographer switches on per gallery. On clientgallery.io there is no expiry setting at all. Nothing in the published rules of any of these platforms takes a gallery down on a timer you did not choose.
That answer surprises people, because the question is usually asked after something went wrong. A client came back after eight months and the link was dead. A photographer read that a platform "archives" old galleries and assumed the galleries had gone dark. Both of those are real, and neither of them is a platform expiring your work on its own.
The confusion comes from four separate things that all get called expiry. This page separates them, then lists what each vendor publishes in its own words, checked on 7 September 2026.
The four clocks people call expiry
Almost every argument about how long galleries last is really an argument about which of these four events someone is describing. They have different causes and different fixes.
- The gallery goes offline. A date the photographer set has passed, so the link stops serving photos. This is a setting, not a default. Pixieset, Pic-Time and CloudSpot all describe it as something you turn on per gallery, and ShootProof exposes it as an expiration date field in gallery settings.
- The gallery is hidden. The gallery still exists in the photographer's account and still counts against storage, but the client cannot reach it. Pixieset's Auto Expiry works this way, and so does Pic-Time's. Nothing has been deleted, and the photographer can put the gallery back up.
- The download window closes. The gallery is up and the photos are visible, but the heavy download has its own shorter clock. CloudSpot has a separate Download Expires date. Pixieset expires a purchased digital-download link after seven days. clientgallery.io's full-resolution ZIP is a three-day handoff. A closed download window is the most common cause of a client saying "the link is broken" when the gallery is perfectly fine.
- The files are deleted. This is the only one that is irreversible, and on every platform here it is caused by the photographer deleting the gallery or by the subscription ending. It is not caused by time passing.
A fifth event gets mistaken for expiry and deserves its own section below: Pic-Time's archiving of older galleries changes how fast files come back, not whether the gallery is reachable.
What each platform publishes about gallery expiry
Every cell below is the vendor's own published position, read on 7 September 2026. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so rather than guessing.
| Platform | Expires on its own? | What the photographer can switch on | What an expired gallery does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pixieset | No. Collections stay online while the subscription is active, or until you delete them. | Auto Expiry, per collection, under Settings then General. Collections with a date expire at 11:59 pm local time. | Status flips from Published to Hidden. The collection is not deleted and can be re-published at any time. A reminder email to the client is optional. |
| Pic-Time | No default expiry is published. Expiry is opt-in per gallery. | Expire Gallery, ticked in the gallery's Gallery Setup tab. | The gallery stays on the account and still counts against storage, but the client cannot reach it. Alert emails go out 7, 4 and 1 days before, then a Project Expired email. Timing can drift by about 20 minutes. |
| ShootProof | An expiration date lives in gallery settings. No default period is published. | The expiration date itself, plus an auto-archive setting for a chosen number of days after that gallery expires. | At 11:59 pm on that date, in the studio's time zone, the gallery expires and becomes inactive. It also drops off the ShootProof Portfolio Website unless you extend the date. Mobile Apps do not expire. |
| CloudSpot | No. Expiry is opt-in per gallery. | An Expiration Date toggle, plus a separate Download Expires date for the ZIP. A reminder email needs the expiry to be at least two days away. | The gallery cover photo still loads, with a message asking the client to get in touch. The download link stops working once the download date passes. |
| clientgallery.io | No. There is no expiry date setting. | Nothing scheduled. A gallery link can be switched off by hand at any time, which leaves the gallery itself intact. | Not applicable. Galleries and their proofs are hosted for as long as the account exists. The only clock is the full-resolution ZIP. |
Read the first column again, because it is the whole answer to the question. Not one of these vendors publishes a rule that takes a gallery down after a fixed number of days. The photographer decides.
Pic-Time archiving is about retrieval speed, not about going dark
This is the single most misread policy in the category, and it is worth getting right. Pic-Time moves the photos of older galleries into long-term storage. Being archived does not mean the gallery expired, was hidden, or was deleted. It means the files are no longer sitting in immediate-download storage, so a download has to be packaged first.
| Gallery upload date | Immediate download for | After that | Once un-archived |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before December 2024 | The first year after upload | Photos move to secure long-term storage. De-archiving takes 4 to 15 hours to package, or about 4 hours when the download is requested from the Photos and Media section. | Accessible for 12 months, then archived again |
| December 2024 onward | The first three years after upload | Same long-term storage and the same de-archive wait | Accessible for 3 years, then archived again |
So the honest way to describe it is a waiting period, not a deadline. If a client asks for a three-year-old gallery on a Pic-Time account, plan for the retrieval to take most of a day rather than assuming the work is gone. What it does mean in practice is that "the gallery is still online" and "the client can download right now" are two different promises, and only the first one is permanent.
What happens when the subscription stops
This is where the real risk sits, and it is where the published record is thinnest. Pixieset states that if you cancel your subscription your collections are kept for a period of time before being deleted. It does not publish how long that period is. None of the other platforms compared here publishes a retention window after cancellation either, so nobody should be quoting one to you.
Treat that gap as the answer rather than as a missing detail. Every gallery on every platform, ours included, is online because someone is paying for it. A lapsed card, a closed business or a forgotten downgrade ends the hosting, and no expiry setting is involved. That is the honest ceiling on any promise a gallery platform can make about permanence.
How long a clientgallery.io gallery stays online
Galleries and their proofs are hosted for as long as the account exists. There is no expiry date field, no auto-hide, and no scheduled deletion of galleries. The photographer can switch a link off by hand if a gallery has to come down, and the gallery itself survives that.
One thing does have a clock, and we would rather state it plainly than let a client discover it. Full-resolution delivery is a handoff, not storage: the photographer uploads one full-resolution ZIP per gallery, it stays live for three days per handoff, and it can be re-uploaded at any time to restart the clock. The gallery and its proofs are untouched when that ZIP expires.
| What | How long | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| The gallery and its proofs | As long as the account exists | 1,000 photos per gallery |
| Proof storage, paid account | As long as the account exists | 250 GB of proofs, a fair-use ceiling |
| Proof storage, free account | As long as the account exists | 5 GB of proofs |
| Full-resolution ZIP | 3 days per handoff, re-uploadable any time | 100 GB of live ZIPs per account |
The plan is one price, 10 $ a month or 100 $ a year, and the ceilings above are abuse tripwires rather than tiers to be upgraded past. Nothing about them shortens how long a gallery is online.
What to tell a client, and what to keep for yourself
The delivery email is where most of this trouble starts, because photographers write "your gallery will be available for a limited time" and leave the client to imagine a deadline. Two specific sentences prevent almost every follow-up.
- Say what stays and what goes. Something like: the gallery stays up as long as I am in business, but the full-size download is a short window, so pull the files onto a computer this week. That is true on every platform in this table, with only the length of the window changing.
- Tell them where to put the files. A client who saves photos only to a phone will lose them in a handset upgrade. Ask for one copy on a computer and one in whatever cloud they already use.
- Never present the gallery as their archive. If you say the photos live online forever, you have made a promise your billing cannot keep.
For yourself the rule is shorter. Your own backup of the finished files is the only guarantee in this entire discussion, on any platform. Every hosted gallery, ours included, depends on a subscription staying alive, a company staying in business and nobody deleting the wrong thing. Keep your own copy of the originals, off-site, and treat the gallery purely as delivery.
When one of the others is the right answer
Being honest about this cuts against us in one clear case. If your workflow depends on galleries going dark on a schedule, we are the wrong tool: clientgallery.io has no expiry date field, so a link stays live until you switch it off by hand. Pixieset, Pic-Time, CloudSpot and ShootProof all publish a per-gallery expiry control, with client warning emails on Pic-Time and CloudSpot. A studio that expires galleries to push print sales, or to keep old sensitive work out of circulation automatically, should use a platform that automates it.
Two more honest notes. ShootProof charges for archiving expired galleries on the lower plans, which is a running cost but also a real safety net you can buy. Pixieset's Hidden state is genuinely well designed, because an expired collection can be republished in a click rather than rebuilt.
Where we differ is narrower than most comparison pages suggest. It is not that other platforms delete your galleries and we do not. It is that we removed the expiry question entirely, priced storage flat instead of by tier, and put the only clock on the one thing that genuinely costs money to keep live.
Sources
- Pixieset, "Do my Collections expire?" https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975012-Do-my-Collections-expire (fetched 2026-09-07)
- Pixieset, "How do I set an Expiry Date to the Gallery" https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003479211-How-do-I-set-an-Expiry-Date-to-the-Gallery (fetched 2026-09-07)
- Pixieset, "Selling digital downloads" https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003008271-Selling-digital-downloads (fetched 2026-09-07)
- Pic-Time, "How do I set the expiration date for my client galleries?" https://help.pic-time.com/en/articles/7905685-how-do-i-set-the-expiration-date-for-my-client-galleries (fetched 2026-09-07)
- Pic-Time, "How do I unarchive an older gallery?" https://help.pic-time.com/en/articles/8951337-how-do-i-unarchive-an-older-gallery (fetched 2026-09-07)
- ShootProof help centre, gallery expiration article 115009679648 https://help.shootproof.com/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles/115009679648.json (fetched 2026-09-07)
- ShootProof help centre, expiration search results including the Portfolio Website and Mobile App articles https://help.shootproof.com/api/v2/help_center/articles/search.json?query=gallery%20expire%20expiration (fetched 2026-09-07)
- ShootProof help centre, archiving cost article 115008322408 https://help.shootproof.com/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles/115008322408.json (fetched 2026-09-07)
- CloudSpot, "How to expire a gallery" https://help.cloudspot.io/en/articles/9106306-how-to-expire-a-gallery (fetched 2026-09-07)
- CloudSpot, "What do clients see when their gallery has expired" https://help.cloudspot.io/en/articles/114622-what-do-clients-see-when-their-gallery-has-expired (fetched 2026-09-07)
- CloudSpot, "Delivering galleries and images" https://help.cloudspot.io/en/articles/5160370-delivering-galleries-and-images (fetched 2026-09-07)
- clientgallery.io figures were read in the product's own code on 2026-09-07: gallery and proof hosting, the 1,000-photo and 250 GB fair-use ceilings, the 5 GB free allowance, and the three-day full-resolution ZIP handoff with a 100 GB standing cap.
Frequently asked
Do client photo galleries expire automatically?
No, not on the platforms compared here. Pixieset publishes that collections stay online while the subscription is active and do not expire unless Auto-Expiry is used. Pic-Time and CloudSpot both make expiry an opt-in setting per gallery. ShootProof exposes an expiration date in gallery settings and publishes no default period. clientgallery.io has no expiry setting at all.
What happens to a Pixieset collection when it expires?
It is set to Hidden rather than deleted. Pixieset states that expiry changes the status from Published to Hidden, so clients can no longer view the images, but the collection stays in the account and can be re-published by changing or removing the Auto Expiry date. Collections with a date expire at 11:59 pm local time.
Does Pic-Time delete or hide galleries after a year?
No. Pic-Time's archiving rule is about retrieval speed, not access. Photos in galleries uploaded before December 2024 are available for immediate download for the first year, and three years for galleries from December 2024 onward. After that the photos move to long-term storage and a download has to be packaged first, which the help centre puts at 4 to 15 hours. The gallery itself is not taken offline by that rule.
Why did my client's download link stop working when the gallery is still up?
Because the download has its own clock, separate from the gallery. CloudSpot has a Download Expires date that kills the ZIP link on its own schedule. Pixieset expires a purchased digital-download link after seven days and lets the photographer resend a new one. On clientgallery.io the full-resolution ZIP is a three-day handoff that the photographer can re-upload at any time.
What happens to my galleries if I stop paying?
Pixieset publishes that collections are kept for a period of time after cancellation before being deleted, without saying how long. No other platform compared here publishes a retention window after cancellation. The safe assumption is that hosting ends when payment ends, on every platform including ours.
How long does clientgallery.io keep a gallery online?
For as long as the account exists. There is no expiry date field and no scheduled deletion of galleries or proofs. Fair-use ceilings are 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account, with 5 GB on a free account. The only clock is the full-resolution ZIP, which stays live three days per handoff and can be re-uploaded any time.
Should I tell clients their gallery is permanent?
No. Every hosted gallery depends on a subscription staying active and a company staying in business, so no gallery is an archive. Tell clients the gallery stays up while you are in business, ask them to download the full-size files onto a computer during the download window, and keep your own off-site copy of the originals as the real guarantee.
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