A Photo Gallery Link That Never Expires

Our promise has exactly one dependency, and it is not a timer. It is an active account.

While the account is paid, nothing removes a gallery from the internet except the photographer. There is no expiry setting to forget, no per-gallery fee that makes an old gallery expensive to keep, and no storage tier that pushes you to delete last year's work to make room for this year's. The plan is one price, 10 $ a month or 100 $ a year, and old galleries cost the same to keep as new ones, which is to say nothing extra.

If the account lapses, the hosting ends. We will not dress that up. A cancelled subscription, a dead card or a closed business ends the arrangement that keeps the link alive, and that is true of every hosted gallery product in this category, including the ones with much larger companies behind them. The honest phrasing is that the link never expires on its own, and it outlives the account by nothing.

This is why we tell photographers never to describe a gallery to a client as their archive. Your own backup of the finished files is the only permanent copy in this entire discussion. The gallery is delivery, and delivery that stays up for years is convenient rather than guaranteed.

Most people searching for a photo link that never expires arrived at the question after a file-transfer link died on them. That is worth separating out, because a transfer tool is not a broken gallery. It is a different product doing a different job, and it is very good at that job.

A transfer moves a heavy file from one person to another with no account on the receiving end. Nothing about that job implies permanence, and the product is not designed to provide it. WeTransfer publishes its plan limits in terms of transfer counts and account storage capacity, with the Ultimate plan described as unlimited transfers up to 1 TB per transfer and accounts storing up to 2 TB by default. Those are the figures of a pipe, not of a home for your work.

A gallery is a hosted page under your name that a client can come back to. The link is meant to be bookmarked, forwarded to a mother-in-law, and opened again eighteen months later. That is a hosting arrangement, and the price reflects a monthly cost rather than a one-off send.

If a photographer only ever needs to push a folder to an art director once, a transfer tool is the right answer and a gallery subscription is overkill. The mismatch only becomes a problem when a transfer link is used as a delivery archive, which is where the dead-link emails come from.

Every cell below is the vendor's own published position. Read it before assuming a platform is the villain, because on the specific question of gallery links, one competitor answers it as well as we do.

Note the second row honestly. On the narrow question in the title, Pixieset's published position is the same as ours: the collection stays up while you pay, and expiry is something you choose to switch on. Anyone telling you that rival gallery platforms quietly expire your work is selling past the facts. Our difference is not that we refuse to delete galleries. It is that we removed the expiry setting, removed the storage tiers, and put the only clock on the one thing that genuinely costs money to keep live.

Note the fourth and fifth rows too, because they cut the other way. A photographer on a personal Google account cannot expire a delivery link even when expiring it is the right thing to do, and a shared Google Photos album has no documented password at all. A link that never expires is not automatically the safer link.

Here are the numbers behind both halves of the promise, so nothing has to be taken on trust.

Proofs are browser-compressed JPEGs of roughly 0.6 MB each, sized for fast viewing on a phone. That compression is the reason a 250 GB ceiling holds hundreds of thousands of photos, and it is the reason the price can stay flat while galleries accumulate for years.

Full resolution is treated as a handoff rather than as storage. The photographer uploads one full-resolution ZIP per gallery, the client pulls it down, and the ZIP comes off after three days. If the client misses the window, or comes back in a year, the photographer re-uploads the ZIP and the window restarts. The gallery and its proofs are untouched the whole time, so the link the client bookmarked keeps working whether or not a ZIP is currently sitting behind it.

We do not claim full-resolution downloads forever, because that would be a promise about warehousing masters and we do not warehouse masters. We host JPEG proofs. Saying so plainly is what keeps one flat price honest.

A link can die without anything expiring. Three of the most common causes have nothing to do with a date.

• The photographer deleted the gallery to free up room. This is what storage tiers cause. When keeping three-year-old weddings pushes an account into a higher bracket, old galleries get cleared out, and the client's bookmark dies years before any expiry setting would have fired. A flat price with a fair-use ceiling removes that incentive entirely.
• The address changed. Galleries live under the studio's own subdomain with no platform branding, so the link a client saved reads as yours and keeps pointing at the same place. Moving your marketing site or changing your logo does not touch it.
• The download was confused with the gallery. A client who clicks a full-size download after the ZIP window has closed reports that "the link is broken" when the gallery is perfectly fine. This is by far the most common false alarm, and it is a wording problem in the delivery email rather than a technical one.

Two sentences in the delivery email prevent almost all of it. Tell the client the gallery stays up as long as you are in business. Tell them the full-size download is a short window, so they should pull the files onto a computer this week and keep a second copy somewhere else.

There are real cases where we are the wrong tool, and a comparison page that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

If your workflow depends on galleries going dark on a schedule, we do not do it. clientgallery.io has no expiry date field, so a link stays live until you switch it off by hand. Pixieset publishes an Auto-Expiry feature for exactly this, and a studio that expires galleries to create print-sale urgency or to keep older sensitive work out of circulation automatically should use a platform that automates it rather than relying on a reminder in a calendar.

If your delivery is genuinely one-way and one-off, a transfer tool is cheaper and faster than any gallery subscription, and the recipient needs no account at all. If your business runs on an integrated print store and a CRM, the all-in-one platforms are a real product and leaving them for a flat-price delivery tool means giving up things you use.

What we are good at is narrower. One flat price, galleries that stay up because keeping them costs you nothing extra, your name on the link, and a full-resolution handoff you can restart whenever a client asks.

• Pixieset, "Do my Collections expire?" https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975012-Do-my-Collections-expire (article updated 2026-07-14, read 2026-09-11)
• Dropbox, "Set shared link permissions" https://help.dropbox.com/share/set-link-permissions (fetched 2026-09-11)
• Google Drive Help, "Share files from Google Drive" https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2494822 (fetched 2026-09-11)
• Google Photos Help, "Share photos & videos" https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6131416 (fetched 2026-09-11)
• WeTransfer, "Plan limits" https://wetransfer.com/help-center/subscriptions/plan-limits (fetched 2026-09-11)
• clientgallery.io figures were read in the product's own code on 2026-09-11: the flat 10 $ monthly and 100 $ annual price, gallery and proof hosting for the life of the account, proof JPEGs of about 0.6 MB each, 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.