Client Gallery App for iPhone: What Photographers Actually Get

The client receives a link. They tap it and the gallery opens. There is no app to install, no account to create, no password to invent, and nothing to update later. If you set a gallery password, that is the only thing standing between the link and the photos.

Inside the gallery, on a phone, the client can do the work you actually need them to do:

• Mark favourites and send picks. They tap through the photos, mark the ones they want, and send the selection back to you. That is the whole proofing round, done with a thumb on a screen.
• Download the whole gallery in one tap, or download any single image on its own if they only want one for a message or a profile picture.
• See your studio, not a platform. The gallery sits on your own subdomain and carries no platform branding on any client-facing page. Nothing in the gallery tells the client which tool you pay for.

If you organise a long shoot into sections, understand what the client sees. Sections are a studio-side organising tool. On the phone the client gets one scrolling page with a jump-to bar at the top, so the ceremony, the portraits and the reception are three taps away rather than three separate destinations. There is no navigating in and back out, which is exactly the behaviour you want on a small screen.

A section can also be shared on its own link. That standalone page is view-only: no ZIP download, no picks, no full-resolution download, no face search, and no link back to the parent gallery. Send it when a client wants to show one part of the shoot to someone who should not have the rest.

A link is not an app, and there are four things a native app would give you that this does not. None of them are secrets, and if one of them is a dealbreaker you should know now.

• No push notifications to the client. You cannot buzz their phone to remind them that the gallery is waiting. Reminders go out the way they always did, by message or email, from you.
• No offline viewing. A gallery needs a connection. On a plane or in a basement venue there is nothing to look at unless the client already downloaded the files to their phone.
• Nothing in the app switcher. There is no icon on the home screen reminding the client that they owe you a selection.
• The client has to keep the link. No account means no login page to recover a gallery from. If they lose the message, they come back to you and you send it again.

And the one nobody says out loud: if what you want is your own branded app in the App Store, with your studio name under the icon on your client's home screen, we are not that and we are not going to pretend otherwise. That is a different product with a different price.

The studio side is designed around a computer, and this page is not going to describe a phone workflow it cannot stand behind. The main publishing path is the two-way Lightroom Classic plugin: you publish proofs straight out of your catalog and pull the client's picks back into it when they are done. Lightroom Classic is desktop software, so that loop starts and ends at a desk.

That is a limitation worth weighing honestly. If your working pattern is to shoot on a phone and publish from the same phone before you get home, this is not the tool built for that. If your working pattern is to shoot, cull and edit on a computer and then have clients do their part on their phones, it fits, because the phone half is where all the client behaviour lives anyway.

One format note if you shoot stills on an iPhone and intend to deliver them. Galleries hold JPEGs. Apple documents High Efficiency as the default capture behaviour on supported iPhone and iPad models, which writes HEIF photos, and documents Settings > Camera > Formats > Most Compatible as the alternative that captures in JPEG instead. Apple also documents that media transferred to a computer over USB may be converted automatically, and that enabling Keep Originals prevents that conversion. Decide which of those you want before a shoot, not after.

Phones are where bad file-size decisions get punished. A client on a weak connection who has to wait on a wall of heavy images simply closes the tab and tells you later that the gallery did not work.

Photos you upload are compressed in the browser before they are hosted, landing at roughly 0.6 MB each as proof JPEGs. Proofs are sized for fast viewing: sharp enough to judge a photo on a phone screen, light enough that a few hundred of them scroll without stalling. That number is the reason a long gallery is usable on cellular data at all.

Full-resolution delivery is deliberately separate. You upload a full-resolution ZIP for a gallery, it stays live for three days per handoff, and you can re-upload it any time the client misses the window. Each account can keep 100 GB of standing ZIPs.

Be realistic about that ZIP on a phone. A wedding-sized archive downloading over cellular data onto a device that is already low on space is a genuine friction point, and the client will feel it. Tell clients plainly to grab the full-resolution ZIP on a computer, on a good connection, and to use the phone for looking and choosing. The split between the two is a feature, not an inconvenience: the phone gets the light files, the computer gets the heavy ones.

For a big event gallery, Face Search lets a guest find their own photos instead of scrolling past nine hundred frames of other people. It is off by default and you turn it on per gallery, so it never appears on a portrait or boudoir gallery unless you decided it should.

The mechanism matters on a phone, where a guest is being asked to take a selfie in public. The matching runs entirely inside the guest's own browser, and the selfie is never uploaded. Nothing about their face leaves the device they are holding. That is a claim we can make because of how it is built, not a policy promise.

There is a real answer here and a limit, and both should be clear before you start drawing conclusions from numbers.

Analytics are account-wide. Across everything you have published, the dashboard shows gallery visits, unique visitors, photo views, favourites, picks sent, ZIP downloads, shares, time spent and average time per visitor, a split of mobile, desktop and tablet, and the five most-viewed photos with their view and like counts. The mobile share in that split is how you find out how phone-first your clients really are, and for most portrait and wedding studios the answer is more phone-first than expected.

The only signal tied to a single gallery is the opened indicator on the studio tile, with All, Seen by client and Not opened yet filters. That tells you whether to send a nudge. It does not tell you which device that particular client used, and the page is not going to imply otherwise.

Visitors are counted without being identified, and your own visits are excluded so your testing does not inflate the numbers.

One plan, $10 a month or $100 a year. There is no seat model: a two-person studio shares one account, and there are no per-assistant logins or roles. Hosted galleries never expire. There is no print store, no commission and no per-gallery fee.

Those ceilings exist so the price can stay flat. Galleries hold JPEG photos: no RAW warehousing and no master video. If you were looking for an app because you wanted your phone to be the centre of the operation, that is the wrong reason to pick this. If you were looking for an app because you were worried your client would not install one, that worry is solved here by removing the install entirely.

• Product facts on this page (price, fair-use ceilings, proof compression, full-resolution ZIP handling, section share links, Face Search behaviour, analytics scope, the absence of a seat model and the absence of any mobile application) were verified in the clientgallery.io application code on 21 September 2026.
• Apple, "Using HEIF or HEVC media on Apple devices" (High Efficiency as the default capture behaviour, the Most Compatible setting, and Keep Originals on transfer to a computer): https://support.apple.com/en-us/116944, fetched 21 September 2026.