Branded Client Portal for a Photography Studio

On this platform, portal means one thing: a parent gallery that lives under your own subdomain and holds one section per shoot. You send the client the parent link once. They bookmark it. Every new job you do for them becomes a new section inside that same gallery, at that same link.

From the client's side the experience is close to what they imagined. They open a page with your name on it, and their work is organised by shoot. What is missing is the account layer. There is no sign-in screen, no password reset email, no per-user permission, no record of who is looking. They hold a link, and the link is the access.

That is worth saying out loud to the client too. A link is easy to forward. If you are working on something confidential, the gallery password is the control you have, and its limits are covered further down.

Some studios genuinely need the account layer, and a gallery will not fake it for them. Buy client-management software if you need any of the following in one place:

• A client login, so that access survives a forwarded link and can be revoked per person rather than per gallery.
• Per-user permissions, for example an art director who can approve and an assistant who can only view.
• Contracts and signatures attached to the same client record the photos live in.
• Invoicing and payments the client can see and settle from the same screen.
• A project pipeline, with stages, tasks and dates that the client can follow.

A gallery platform priced as a gallery platform will not grow into that, and you should not wait for it to. If two or more of those lines describe a real problem you have this month, stop reading comparison pages and go look at studio-management tools. If none of them do, the branded parent gallery below is a smaller, cheaper and more durable answer.

The whole build is two decisions. The gallery is the client. The sections are the shoots.

Name the gallery for the client, not for a job. "Beaumont Restaurant Group" rather than "Beaumont Spring Menu." That name is the thing you keep for years, so it should not go stale the moment the next shoot lands. Inside it, each section carries the job name and its date: "Spring Menu, March 2026", "Patio Launch, June 2026", "Staff Headshots, September 2026."

Sections are created in the studio, or automatically by dragging a folder in, which makes one section per folder. If your desktop folders are already named the way you want the sections named, the drag does the whole job.

The real structural limit, stated plainly: there is exactly one level of sections. A gallery holds sections. A section does not hold sections. There are no folders inside folders and no arbitrary depth, and you should not plan a naming system that assumes otherwise. If a shoot has two obvious halves, they are two sections side by side, or one section with the halves separated by naming and photo order. That is the honest ceiling of the structure.

The branding argument is the reason to do this at all. A client who opens a link and sees a vendor's product remembers the vendor. A client who opens a link and sees your studio remembers your studio.

Client-facing pages carry:

• Your logo, at the top of the page the client lands on, in place of any platform mark.
• Your colours and your fonts, applied to the gallery itself rather than to a border around someone else's design.
• Your own subdomain, in the form yourstudio.clientgallery.io, which is provisioned automatically rather than being a setup task you have to chase.
• No platform badge, no powered-by line and no link back to us. There is nothing on the page inviting your client to go shopping for their own account.
• Pages that search engines are told not to index, so a client's work does not turn up in a search for their company name.

One honest qualification. The subdomain is yours, but the domain still carries our name. This is a branded gallery, not a fully custom domain. A client reading the address bar closely can tell which platform you use. Everything above the address bar is yours; the address itself is shared.

Access is a link. That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth understanding rather than working around.

You can turn on a password per gallery. It is opt-in and off by default. On the server it gates the gallery page, the whole-gallery ZIP download, the full-resolution ZIP, comments and face search. A section link resolves to its parent gallery, which means one password covers every section. You set it once for the client, not once per shoot, and it keeps working as you add sections over the years.

The limit you must know before you promise anything: individual proof image URLs are public and do not expire. The password stops the gallery page from disclosing those URLs, but it does not protect an image URL that somebody already holds. If a client copied an image address last year and passed it on, adding a password today does not reach it. Say what the password gates, which is the list above, and nothing broader.

If you publish from Lightroom Classic, the plugin can set the gallery password from the Export dialog, so a gallery can go live already password-set rather than sitting open for the minutes it takes you to go and configure it.

You will be tempted to send a client a link straight to the new section, because it skips a click. Read this first.

A section link is view-only. It shows the photos and does nothing else. The parent gallery link carries the full feature set.

The practical rule is short. Send the parent gallery link. It is the client's permanent address, it is the one that does everything, and it is the one you want bookmarked. Use a section link only when you deliberately want a view-only pointer at one shoot, for example when you are showing a single job to someone who should not be downloading the rest.

There is a second half to this that the client never sees, and the distinction is the point.

The studio dashboard has a client record with free-text notes, and galleries attach to it. That is where the things you would otherwise keep in a spreadsheet go: the billing contact, the brand colours they insist on, the fact that their marketing lead approves and their office manager only forwards, the date of the last shoot, what they said about the crop on the patio images.

This is your view, not theirs. The client record is a studio-side tool. It is not a page the client opens, it is not exposed by any link you send, and nothing in it appears in the gallery. Your client never logs in to see their notes, because there is nothing for them to log in to.

So the two halves work like this. The gallery is the branded artefact the client holds. The client record is the memory you keep about them. Both point at the same relationship, and only one of them is public.

1. Upload your logo and set your colours and fonts once, at the studio level, so every gallery you create afterwards is already yours.
2. Create one gallery named for the client. Resist naming it after the first job.
3. Create the first section, named for the shoot and its date, or drag in a folder that is already named that way.
4. Decide on the password now rather than later. If you set it, set it before the link goes out.
5. Send the parent gallery link, once, with a sentence telling the client to bookmark it because every future shoot will appear at the same address.
6. Open the client record and write down what you already know about them, so the next shoot starts from something.
7. For the next job, add a section to the existing gallery rather than creating a new gallery. This is the habit that turns a gallery into a portal.

Step seven is the only one people get wrong. A new gallery per shoot gives the client a new link every time, which is exactly the problem the parent gallery was supposed to solve.

What you get: a permanent address under your own subdomain, carrying only your brand, organised by shoot, with one password covering the lot, that costs you nothing beyond the plan you were already paying for and requires no portal software, no separate subscription and no setup project.

What you do not get: a client login, a client account, a client-visible list of galleries, per-user permissions, contracts, invoices or a project pipeline. A parent gallery is a branded home for the work. It is not a business system, and a page that told you otherwise was selling you something.

For most studios shooting repeat work for a handful of commercial clients, the branded parent gallery is the whole answer. For a studio whose real problem is approvals, billing and access control across a team, it is not, and the honest advice is to spend the money on software built for that instead.