Personal Brand Photography Delivery: Social Crops and Full-Resolution Files

A wedding client wants to relive a day. A brand client wants to publish. Their questions are practical: which photo goes on the About page, which one is the new profile picture, what goes into the next ten posts.

The usual failure is a delivery that answers none of those questions. The client downloads a ZIP of large landscape files, opens a phone app, and crops every photo by hand. Some of those crops cut off a hand or a product. Some never get made, and the photos sit unused.

Unused photos are a missed chance for a brand photographer. Work the client actually posts keeps your name in front of their audience. The delivery should make posting the easy path.

Both lanes live in the same client gallery, on the studio’s own subdomain, with no platform branding on the page.

Proofs are sized for fast viewing on screens. That is enough for a social post. It is not a print file, which is why the second lane exists.

Once the client has sent their picks, the gallery shows four crop buttons. Each button downloads every pick in that shape, starred and loved photos alike.

Here is how the crops behave, so you can set expectations with the client.

• The buttons appear only after picks are sent and at least one photo is picked.
• Each photo is centre-cropped in the browser from the hosted proof.
• The files are saved as JPEGs named by pick number and shape, so a batch stays sorted.
• The client cannot move the framing.
• The crop buttons are on by default and can be switched off per gallery.
• A section’s standalone share link never shows them.

The centre crop is the one limit worth planning for. It is covered in the shooting section below.

The website designer, the print shop and the magazine all want the real file. On a paid plan you upload your finished export as one ZIP per gallery. The client sees a download button and a line telling them how many days it stays available.

The three-day window is a feature for brand work, not a gap. Tell the client to save the ZIP to their own drive the day it arrives. When their web designer asks for the files three months later, re-upload the ZIP and send the gallery link again.

If you have the iPhone app with download notifications on, you get a push when the client opens the full-resolution ZIP. That tells you the handoff actually happened.

The proof gallery itself does not expire. The client can keep coming back for crops and previews for as long as your account exists.

1. Cull and publish proofs. Upload your selects, or publish them from Lightroom Classic with the two-way plugin. Group the session into sections such as Headshots, Workspace and Product. The client sees one scrolling page with a jump-to bar.
2. Write a welcome note. It shows under the gallery title. Tell the client how many picks the package covers, that a heart marks a favourite and a star marks a maybe, and that social crops appear once they send.
3. Let the client pick. Picks are made in the full-screen view with the star and heart buttons. If you switch on comments, the client can draw on a photo to show a stray hair or a logo to remove.
4. Receive the picks. The client taps Send my picks and gives a name and email. That locks the selection. You get an email with the loved and starred counts.
5. Pull picks into Lightroom. The plugin matches by filename. A star becomes 3 stars, a love becomes 5 stars and a Pick flag, all in a collection named after the gallery. You can also export the picks as a plain text list of filenames.
6. Retouch and mark progress. Flag each finished photo on the retouch round page. The client sees a badge on those photos and a count of how many picks are retouched.
7. Hand off the ZIP. Upload the full-resolution export. The client now has social crops for this week and master files for everything else.

If the client wants to change their selection, the studio can reopen picking. The earlier picks are kept, and the client is not notified, so send them a short message yourself.

A centre crop keeps the middle of the frame. A subject placed on the left third of a wide landscape frame can lose a shoulder or a product in the Story shape.

• Give every key frame some room around the subject so a tight vertical still works.
• Shoot a vertical variant of the setups the client will post most, such as the headshot and the product in hand.
• Keep text-safe space in a few frames for quote graphics and announcements.
• For a frame that only works off-centre, crop it yourself and include your version in the full-resolution ZIP.

Tell the client this in the welcome note. The one-click crops cover the bulk of their posts, and your hand-made crops cover the hero shots.

Some studios want the client to choose before they can save anything. Each gallery has a download switch, but it does not cover every button.

If a session is not paid yet, the simplest control is timing: upload the full-resolution ZIP only after payment. You can paste your own payment link into the gallery, and the client sees a Pay your invoice button. Nothing unlocks automatically when they pay. You decide when to hand off.

clientgallery.io has no print store and takes no commissions. A brand studio that earns a meaningful share of its revenue from prints, albums or wall art should keep a platform with a built-in store.

It also has no seat model. A studio with several assistants who each need their own login will share one account here.

The gallery hosts JPEGs and does not warehouse RAW files. Keep your masters and your catalog on your own drives and backups.

Usage licensing is outside the product. If your brand packages carry licence terms, put them in your contract and in the welcome note.

This page states no external figure. Every number and behaviour above describes clientgallery.io and was checked against the product’s code on 16 September 2026: plan prices, the full-resolution ZIP terms, the four crop shapes and their conditions, the download switch scope, picks and notifications, and the Lightroom import mapping.