How to Share Photos With Clients Privately

When a photographer says a delivery needs to be private, one of three things is usually meant. They are worth pulling apart, because they need different tools.

One: nobody stumbles onto it. The gallery should not be findable by search, guessable from another link, or openable by a stranger who ends up with the URL. This is the problem a password solves, and it solves it properly.

Two: nobody gets it but the people you chose. The link reaches your client and stops there. No technical control can deliver this, and any product that implies it can is overselling.

Three: the photos cannot travel after delivery. Once a person can see an image, they can keep it. Screenshots exist on every device your client owns. This is not a software problem and it never has been.

Almost every disappointment with a private gallery comes from buying a tool for problem one and expecting it to solve problems two and three. It will not, ours included.

A gallery password stops a stranger who has the URL. That is a real and common scenario. A link gets pasted into the wrong thread, forwarded to a colleague who was not meant to see the shoot yet, indexed because it sat somewhere public, or opened on a shared screen by someone browsing a client's inbox. A password prompt turns all of those into a dead end. The visitor sees a prompt and nothing else: no thumbnails, no file names, no counts.

Here is the same list from the other direction. A password does not stop:

• Your client forwarding the link and the password together. This is the normal case, not the edge case. They will be in the same message, because that is how people send things.
• A screenshot. Anything on a screen can be photographed by the device it is displayed on, or by a phone pointed at the screen.
• A photo travelling after it is downloaded. Once the file is on your client's machine, it is theirs to send. A gallery has no reach into a file that has left it.
• An image address somebody already holds. A password stops the gallery page from handing out the address of an individual image. It does not retroactively close one that has already been copied.

Dropbox says the same thing about its own strongest link control. Its help page on disabling downloads states that doing so prevents downloading through Dropbox, and adds, in its words: "This doesn't prevent people from saving the content using other methods." That is an honest sentence from a large company, and it is the same boundary every gallery product lives inside.

A password is a courtesy gate between your work and the open internet. Judged as that, it earns its place on most jobs.

It is the right tool when the risk is casual discovery: a family shoot, a corporate headshot day, a product line announced next month, a wedding the couple wants to share first. In every one of those the people you are worried about are strangers, not your client. A password removes strangers.

It is also a signal. Setting one tells the client that this material is not for general circulation, before anybody has to have an awkward conversation about it. That social effect is worth more than the cryptography, and it is fine to use it that way as long as you are clear with yourself about which is doing the work.

It is the wrong tool on its own when the words embargo or non-disclosure agreement appear in the job. That situation needs a contract, a named recipient list, a short window, and a plan to close the gallery on the publication date. We wrote that procedure up separately in sharing unreleased campaign photos. For the mechanics of setting a password on a gallery and what it gates on the server, see how to password protect a client gallery.

Photographers deliver through consumer file tools more often than any gallery company likes to admit, and those tools do have privacy controls. The question is which ones are documented, and on which plan. The table below is built only from each vendor's own published help or pricing page, fetched on 11 September 2026.

Two rows in that table are worth reading twice. On Dropbox, the password is a paid-plan feature: the help page lists it for Professional, Essentials, Standard, Advanced, Business, Business Plus and Enterprise, and free Basic is not on that list. A photographer delivering from a free Dropbox account has no password at all. The cheapest paid Dropbox plan on the Canadian storefront as served in September 2026 is Plus at CA$12.99 a month.

On Google Drive, the expiry control is documented as available only to eligible work or school accounts. Drive's sharing roles are Viewer, Commenter and Editor. A photographer working from a personal Gmail address cannot put a clock on a delivery link at all. There is more on the folder-versus-gallery tradeoff in our Dropbox alternative for photographers page.

A transfer service is a different category again. It is genuinely the fastest way to get a heavy file to someone who has no account and wants none, and that zero friction is a real feature. It is a transfer product rather than a delivery archive, which is a category difference, not a criticism.

Expiry gets treated as a privacy feature. On a delivery it usually behaves as a support feature in reverse.

The pattern is familiar. You send the files. The client downloads some of them onto a laptop that gets replaced. Eleven months later they need the portrait for a press release and the link is dead. You go back to an archive drive, re-export, re-send, and spend an afternoon on a job you were paid for a year ago. Nobody gained any privacy from that expiry. The photos were already downloaded on day two.

Expiry does real work in one place: the moment of the handoff. A full-resolution bundle is a big, permanent artefact, and there is no reason for it to sit at a live URL for years. So we split the two lifespans instead of forcing you to choose. The hosted gallery stays up as long as the account exists, and the full-resolution package has a clock on it that you can restart whenever the client asks.

If you want the long version of that argument, see the photo gallery link that never expires.

Privacy claims are easy to make and hard to check, so here are the concrete numbers behind ours. Everything below is how the product is built, not a plan.

The privacy detail in that table that most people miss is the domain. Galleries run on your own subdomain with no platform branding on the client-facing page. Your client sees your studio, not a marketplace, and the link does not advertise which product you bought. That is presentation rather than security, and it is the part of privacy a client actually notices.

None of this needs a policy document. It needs five habits, and they take about a minute each.

• Password the jobs where a stranger finding it would matter. Not every job. A password on a gallery that did not need one mostly generates messages from clients who cannot find it.
• Pick a password a person can read aloud. Your client will retype it into a text message, so a string of symbols buys nothing and costs them ten minutes.
• Say out loud who the gallery is for. One sentence in the delivery email, naming the people who should have it. This does more real work than any setting, because it is the only control that reaches the human doing the forwarding.
• Keep the full-resolution handoff deliberate. Put the ZIP up when the client is ready to take it, and put it up again when they come back. A live master bundle nobody is downloading is exposure with no benefit.
• Close a gallery you want closed. If a link went somewhere it should not have, revoking the gallery applies to everyone at once, including the people who already have the link. Changing a password only locks out people who have not typed it yet.

And be straight with clients about the last mile. A gallery can keep strangers out. It cannot stop a person you gave photos to from sharing the photos you gave them. Any company telling you otherwise is selling you a feeling. The rest of the delivery picture, including formats, downloads and turnaround, is in delivering photos to clients.

• Dropbox, "Set shared link permissions": help.dropbox.com/share/set-link-permissions. Fetched 11 September 2026. Plan list for password, expiry and download-disabling; the 11:59 pm expiry wording; the note that disabling downloads does not prevent saving by other methods.
• Dropbox, "Plans and Pricing": dropbox.com/plans. Fetched 11 September 2026. Basic free tier; Plus at CA$12.99 a month, monthly billing, Canadian storefront.
• Google, "Share files from Google Drive": support.google.com/drive/answer/2494822. Fetched 11 September 2026. Viewer, Commenter and Editor roles; expiry limited to eligible work or school accounts; owner control over download, print and copy.
• Google, "Share photos & videos": support.google.com/photos/answer/6131416. Fetched 11 September 2026. Anyone with the shared link can view the album; no password or expiry control is documented.
• clientgallery.io product behaviour: price, fair-use ceilings, proof hosting, and the three-day full-resolution handoff are taken from the product as built, verified September 2026.