Client Gallery Software for a Small Studio

These are not the four most impressive features in the category. They are the four that pay you back every single delivery, which at two people is the only test that matters.

Delivery that looks like the studio. The gallery is the last thing a client sees and often the thing they forward to three other people. On this account galleries live at yourname.clientgallery.io. The only header on a gallery page is your own logo or name, and there is no footer. There is no platform branding on any client-facing page, on every plan, because there is only one plan. Subdomain provisioning is best-effort, and while DNS settles a share link falls back to a clientgallery.io/g/ address, which is worth knowing before you promise a client a specific URL.

A selection round trip that does not create admin. This is the part that quietly costs a small studio the most hours, and it is covered in its own section below.

A link that keeps working. Clients come back at six months and at three years, and they come back to the link you already sent. Hosted galleries here stay live for as long as the account exists. They are not expired, hidden or moved to an archived state while you are a customer. Full-resolution delivery works differently and you should not confuse the two: you upload your own full-resolution ZIP per gallery, and the client's link for it is live for 3 days per handoff. You can re-upload it any time, within 100 GB of ZIP uploads a month.

A bill that does not move. Ten dollars a month, or 110 $/year, which works out to 9.17 $ a month. Unlimited galleries and clients, up to 500,000 photos. No print store, no commission, no per-gallery fee, no storage tier. Your first gallery is free. At two people the value of a flat number is not the number, it is that no one has to monitor it.

Those ceilings are published rather than hidden because a two-person studio should be able to check the fit in one sitting. Uploads accept JPG and PNG. There is no RAW and no video. This hosts JPEGs and does not warehouse master files, and that restraint is exactly what keeps the price flat.

Count the steps in your current selection process. Send the gallery. Wait. Receive a list of filenames in an email, or a PDF, or a text message. Find those files. Mark them in your catalogue by hand. That last step is the one that eats an evening, and it eats it at every size of studio, which is why it hurts most at two people.

The round trip here is built to close itself. Your client taps once for a star and twice for a love. No client account is created at any point, which removes the single most common support message a small studio gets. When the picks come back, the Lightroom Classic plugin writes stars into your catalogue as a 3-star rating and loves as a 5-star rating plus a Pick flag, then gathers both into a collection named after the gallery inside a collection set. Colour labels are a separate client-side feature and are not part of that import.

The same plugin is a real publish service in the other direction. Lightroom tracks New and Modified photos, one Publish pushes exactly those, and the gallery keeps the same link. Renaming the collection renames the gallery. Deleting the collection takes the gallery down. Metadata-only edits do not re-push pixels. Renders go out as JPEG in sRGB with location metadata stripped. Note the limit plainly: this is Lightroom Classic only, because the cloud Lightroom app takes no plugins.

If you are a Capture One studio, the honest version is smaller. Every completed gallery has a one-tap Export picks button that downloads the original filenames, one per line, as a .txt file. That file does not distinguish stars from loves. It is a good bridge and it is not the same thing as a catalogue import, and you should price that difference into your decision rather than discover it later.

Two smaller things reduce chasing. Every gallery tile in the studio carries an opened indicator telling you whether your client has opened that gallery, with All, Seen by client and Not opened yet filters, which answers the question that otherwise becomes a follow-up email. And the iOS app can push you a notification when a client sends picks and when a client downloads the full-resolution ZIP, each with its own switch.

Everything in this table is a genuine feature that genuinely helps somebody. The question is whether it helps a studio with no one to run it.

On that last row, be clear about what exists here so you can judge whether it is enough. Analytics on this account are account-wide, not per gallery. You get gallery visits, unique visitors, photo views, favourites, picks sent, ZIP downloads, shares, time spent and average time per visitor, a device split of mobile, desktop and tablet, and the five most-viewed photos with their view and like counts. Visitors are counted by a daily salted hash and are never identified, and your own visits are excluded. There is no referrer, geography or browser breakdown. If a per-gallery report is something you genuinely use, this is a real gap and you should weigh it.

Here is the part a feature grid would bury. Team seats are optional, at 8 $ a month each. There are no roles and no shared studio workspace with separate permissions. Without seats, a two-person studio shares one account and one set of credentials.

For most two-person studios that is a non-issue, because the second person is a spouse, a partner or a long-term second shooter and they already share everything else. For some it is a real objection, particularly if you want an assistant to publish galleries without being able to touch billing. If that is you, seats do not separate permissions, and you should treat that as a no rather than as something to work around.

What does help when two people share one account is that the workload is small by design. Publishing is a Lightroom Publish. Picks come back into the catalogue. Galleries stay up on their own. The iOS app carries a Live Shoot mode that watches the phone's photo library and uploads new arrivals during a session, which is useful when the camera is sending files to the phone, and which is foreground-only. It does not capture from the camera and it is not a background uploader, so it is a thing you run deliberately during a shoot rather than a thing you set and forget. Live-shoot files are renamed on the way in, so they will not filename-match the Lightroom pick import or the .txt export.

On money, the mechanism is deliberately dumb and you should know its shape. You paste your own payment link and a Pay your invoice button appears beside the download. You can switch downloads off until you have been paid. The unlock is manual. There is no payment webhook here and nothing unlocks by itself, so if you want automated pay-to-download gating, this is not that product.

Three cases, and in all three the right advice is to stay where you are.

You sell prints through your gallery. If print and product revenue is a real line in your business, an all-in-one with a storefront, a lab integration and sales automation is a different product and a better one for that job. There is no print store here and no commission, which is a fair trade only if you were never going to sell through the gallery anyway.

You run contracts, invoicing and bookings inside your gallery platform. Pulling delivery out of a working studio manager to save a few dollars a month is a bad trade. You would gain a flat bill and lose the thing that keeps your business in one place.

You deliver video or RAW. Uploads here are JPG and PNG. No RAW, no video. If your handoff includes either, this will not carry it and no setting changes that.

If none of those describe you, the move is small. A one-click Pixieset import brings a whole account over from a bookmark on the Pixieset dashboard, carrying titles, sets, photo order and passwords. Sets are reproduced as sections, and only when a collection has more than one set. Event dates and set descriptions are not carried as fields, they are placed in the gallery's welcome note. Photos arrive at Pixieset's largest web size rather than your original file, so keep your masters. Every call to Pixieset is a read, nothing is written there, and no Pixieset password reaches clientgallery.io. Re-running skips what is already imported, so a migration can run in stages without duplicates.

If you want the pricing arithmetic rather than the feature argument, the per-gallery versus subscription comparison works out where each model breaks even, the alternatives page sets the platforms side by side, and the photo delivery guide covers the workflow all of it is supposed to serve.

This page states no external figures. It deliberately makes no claim about any other platform's price, storage allowance, commission rate or plan names, because those change and none of them was verified on the day this page was written. Where other products are described, they are described by shape, not by number.

Every clientgallery.io figure and behaviour above was checked against the running product on 12 September 2026: the single plan at 10 $/month or 110 $/year with the first gallery free; unlimited galleries and clients, up to 500,000 photos; 1,000 photos per gallery; 500,000 photos per paid account at roughly 0.6 MB per proof JPEG; one gallery of up to 1,000 photos on a free account; 100 GB of full-resolution ZIP uploads a month with each handoff link live for 3 days; hosted galleries staying live for as long as the account exists; studio subdomains with no platform branding on client-facing pages; the Lightroom Classic publish service and pick import; the .txt pick export; account-wide analytics and the per-tile opened indicator; iOS push on picks and downloads; and the manual payment-link unlock. See https://clientgallery.io/ for the current plan.