Automotive Photography Delivery to Dealerships

The delivery has four jobs.

• Every file says which vehicle it shows, without anyone opening it.
• The files arrive in the order the listing should use, lead photo first.
• Whoever does the upload can take a whole vehicle, or a whole batch, in one click.
• Nobody at the dealership has to create an account or install anything.

The first two are decided before upload, by how you name and order the files.

The last two are what the gallery does for you.

Ask the dealership, in writing, which identifier it uses: the stock number, the VIN, or both. Use exactly that in the filename.

The name you give a file before upload is the name the dealer gets back. There are two ways it comes back.

A single photo. The download button on a photo saves it under its shoot filename, unchanged.

The whole gallery. The “Download all photos” button gives one ZIP, named after the gallery title. Inside it, every photo carries a three-digit number in gallery order, then its filename.

Two small changes happen inside that ZIP. Any run of characters other than letters, digits, dots, hyphens and underscores becomes a single underscore, so spaces turn into underscores. And a name that does not end in .jpg or .jpeg gets .jpg added, because the hosted photos are JPEGs.

The lesson from the table: use hyphens instead of spaces, export JPEGs, and the name in the ZIP is your name with a sequence number in front.

That sequence number is useful. It follows the photo order in the gallery, so if the lead exterior is first in the gallery, it is 001 in the ZIP. Check the order on the client page before you send the link.

A naming scheme that works: stock number, a hyphen, then a two-digit shot number in listing order. The dealer can sort by name and get the listing order back even without the ZIP prefix. The trade-offs of renaming, including when not to bother, are in the guide to renaming files before proofing.

This is the decision that matters most for a dealership, and it comes down to one fact.

The ZIP is flat. It holds every photo in the gallery in one numbered list, with no subfolder per section.

You can organise a gallery into sections, one per vehicle, and the client page shows one scrolling page with a jump-to bar listing each section and its photo count. But a section's own share link is view-only: no ZIP, no download buttons, and no link back to the full gallery.

So if the dealer wants to download one vehicle at a time, give each vehicle its own gallery.

On the paid plan, galleries are unlimited and there is no per-gallery fee, so one gallery per vehicle costs nothing extra.

A batch gallery has a fair-use ceiling of 1,000 photos, counting every section. A large lot visit may need splitting across two galleries.

1. Create the gallery on your studio subdomain. The page carries your studio name and logo, with no platform branding.
2. Title it with the identifier the dealer uses. The ZIP takes its name from the title.
3. Upload the named, ordered JPEGs. If you work in Lightroom Classic, the plugin publishes proofs straight from the catalog.
4. Switch picks off. A dealership is collecting, not choosing. With picks off and downloads on, the page tells the visitor the photos are ready and offers the download.
5. Leave downloads on. That shows the “Download all photos” button and a download button on each photo.
6. Add a password if the dealer group wants one. It guards the ZIP as well as the page: a link-holder who has not entered it cannot pull the download.
7. Send the link and password in one message to the person who does the listing upload.

To see whether the dealership has opened the gallery, look at the opened indicator on its tile in your studio. The filters All, Seen by client and Not opened yet sort every gallery by it. That indicator is the only per-gallery signal; the rest of the analytics are account-wide.

There are two kinds of file in play, and the dealership should know which one it is uploading.

The photos hosted in the gallery, and in the “Download all photos” ZIP, are proofs sized for fast viewing on screens.

Whether that size is enough for a given listing tool is the dealership's requirement, not ours. Ask for the required dimensions in writing and compare.

If the listing needs larger files, a paid account can attach a full-resolution ZIP that you build yourself. The dealer sees a separate button for it, with the number of days it stays available.

Name the files inside your full-resolution ZIP with the same scheme. That ZIP is yours, so its contents keep exactly the names you gave them.

More on the proof ZIP is in the download-all answer.

A vehicle can sit on the lot, get re-listed, or move to another rooftop in the same group.

Hosted galleries on clientgallery.io do not expire. The link the dealer already has keeps working for as long as your account exists.

If the dealer needs the full-resolution files again after the 3 days, upload the ZIP again to the same gallery. The link does not change.

When a vehicle is sold and the gallery should stop working, revoke it. The page and its ZIP download both stop answering. Deleting is permanent, so revoke first if you only need the link switched off.

clientgallery.io is a gallery and a download. It is not an automotive merchandising platform.

• It does not push photos into a dealer inventory or listing system. The dealer uploads them.
• It hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video, so walkaround videos need their own delivery channel.
• There is no seat model. A studio with several lot photographers shares one account; there are no per-photographer logins.

If a dealer group needs a direct feed into its inventory system, it needs a tool built for that.

If what you need is a clean, unbranded handoff at a flat price, the method above is the whole job. The same filename discipline, applied to product codes, is in the product photography delivery guide.

This page states no external figure and quotes no dealership or listing-system requirement. Every number on it is a clientgallery.io product fact, checked against the product code on 24 September 2026: the plan prices, the free account allowance, the fair-use ceilings of 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB per paid account, the 3-day full-resolution ZIP with 100 GB of standing ZIPs, the absence of gallery expiry, the single-photo filename, and the ZIP naming (gallery-title ZIP name, three-digit sequence prefix, character replacement, .jpg suffix, no subfolders), plus the password check on the ZIP and the revoked-gallery behaviour.