Client Gallery on a Phone: What Your Clients Actually Experience

The first thing a phone gallery has to survive is the gap between receiving a link and looking at a photo. Every step in that gap loses people, and a phone punishes steps harder than a desk does.

A gallery link opens as a web page. There is no app to install, and on clientgallery.io there is no account to create before viewing or before picking favorites. The client taps the link and the photos are there. If the photographer set a password, that is the one screen in the way.

A name and an email address are asked for once, at the very end, when the client sends their selection. By then they have already done the work, so the request reads as a signature rather than a toll gate.

The gallery lays out as a masonry grid, which means photos keep their own shape instead of being cropped into identical squares. A portrait stays a portrait. The column count changes with the width of the screen: two columns on a phone, three on a tablet, four on a wide desktop screen.

Two columns is a deliberate choice. One column makes a long set feel endless, three shrinks every image to a size where nobody can tell two frames apart.

Images load as the client scrolls toward them, so opening a large gallery does not mean waiting for the whole set. What arrives is a proof: a compressed JPEG made in your own browser at upload time and sized for fast viewing on a screen. The full-resolution files are not in the grid at all and never load while someone is browsing. They travel as a separate handoff, described further down.

That split is the reason a gallery feels quick on mobile data. If your current gallery is slow and you want to work out why, that is its own diagnosis, written up in why your client gallery is slow to load. We publish no load-time number here, because a vendor benchmark on a test gallery tells you nothing about your wedding set on your client's phone.

Tapping a photo in the grid opens it full screen. That is the only thing a grid tap does, which is on purpose: a client scrolling with a thumb should not be able to favorite a photo by accident.

Inside the full-screen view there are two levels of pick. A single tap on the photo stars it. A double tap loves it. There are also explicit star and heart buttons in the tray under the photo, sized as round targets a thumb can hit without aiming, for anyone who would rather press a button than learn a gesture. Tapping the same level again clears it.

Two levels is what makes picking on a phone work at all. The client does a fast first pass, starring anything they like, without deciding anything. The small set of loves becomes the real shortlist. Asking someone to produce a final list of twenty images from four hundred, in one pass, on a phone, is how proofing rounds stall for three weeks. There is more on that pattern in how to get clients to choose their photos faster.

Progress stays visible. A running count sits at the bottom of the screen showing how many photos are starred and how many are loved, and picked photos carry a badge in the grid, so a client who comes back two days later can see where they got to. Picks save as they are made, so nothing is lost if the phone rings. When they are finished they send the selection and the gallery locks, so the list you receive is the list they meant to send.

A phone is excellent for a first pass and poor for a final decision. Saying so to your client is worth more than any feature.

• Sharpness cannot be judged at that size. Almost everything looks sharp on a small bright screen. A client who picks on a phone will sometimes choose the frame where the focus missed, and you will be the one who notices.
• Small faces hide their problems. A half-blink, a stray glance, a child looking the wrong way at the back of a group shot. All of that reads at full size and disappears at thumbnail size.
• Album images need a bigger screen. Choosing which frames carry a spread means thinking about sequence, pairing and crop room. That is a table and a laptop job, not a bus stop job.
• Color is at the mercy of the room. Screen brightness, night mode and direct sunlight all move what your client sees. Nobody is approving a skin tone from a phone in a parking lot.
• There is no swipe between photos. The full-screen view moves with previous and next buttons rather than a swipe gesture, and tapping outside the photo closes it. Worth knowing before a client mentions it to you.

The practical answer is one sentence in the message you send with the link: star everything you like on your phone, then open the same link on a computer before you pick your final favorites. Clients follow that instruction when it is given. They never invent it on their own. Before you send, open the link on your own phone with WiFi off, which is the only test that reflects what your client will see.

The most common thing a client wants from a phone is one photo, right now, to send to their mother or put on a profile. If that requires a computer, they screenshot the gallery instead, and your work goes out into the world with the browser interface still in it.

When the photographer has downloads enabled, every photo carries its own download button, and on a phone that button stays visible rather than waiting for a hover that will never happen. One tap saves the image through the browser. What saves is the proof: sized for screens, right for a message, a story or a profile picture, and not intended as a print file.

There is also one button that downloads the whole gallery as a single ZIP. It works on a phone, and we will still tell you a ZIP of several hundred photos is a computer job. Unpacking an archive on a phone is fiddly on every operating system, the file is large enough to care about on mobile data, and it is not what the client wanted when they asked for that one shot of the two of them.

Full-resolution files are a separate handoff. You upload one full-resolution ZIP per gallery when the client is ready for finals, and it stays live for three days per handoff. You can upload it again any time, so a client who misses the window is a two-minute fix rather than an argument. The broader tradeoffs of delivery methods are covered in delivering photos to clients.

Clients share galleries whether you help them or not. They paste the link into a family group chat, which is free marketing for you as long as the page carries your name and not a platform's. The gallery has a share button that hands the link to the phone's own share sheet where the browser supports it, so the client picks a contact or an app the way they do with everything else. Where it is not supported, the button copies the link and says so.

After a client sends their picks, they are offered social crops of the photos they chose: a vertical story shape, a tall post shape, a square and a wide frame. The crops are cut in the client's own browser from the proof, so nothing is uploaded or processed anywhere. It exists for one reason: if you do not give people a shaped file, they crop yours badly inside a social app and the result still carries your name. Saving several crops in a row is smoother on a computer than on a phone, which is the honest limit of it.

If comments are turned on, a client can type a note on a photo and draw on it with a fingertip. That is the one place a touchscreen beats a mouse outright: circling the person to remove is easier with a finger than with a trackpad. Those notes come back attached to the photo rather than buried in an email thread.

Face Search is included in the plan, and a phone is the best device for it because the camera is already pointed at the person. The client taps the button in the gallery header, the front camera opens directly, and they take a selfie. The gallery filters down to the photos that person appears in, and one tap switches back to the full set. The comparison runs on the client's own device, in their browser.

This is what makes a large event gallery usable on a phone at all. A wedding guest will not scroll two thousand frames looking for themselves, and a corporate attendee will not scroll at all. It works best when there is enough of a face to compare: profiles, deep shade and heavy backlight are where it gets less certain, so describe it to clients as a shortcut rather than a guarantee.

One thing to know before you send links: Face Search is available on the main gallery link, not on a link to a single section inside a gallery. Send guests the main link.

Length is the thing that breaks a mobile gallery, and it is entirely under your control.

Sub-galleries split one gallery into named sections: getting ready, ceremony, portraits, reception. On a phone those names appear as a row of chips above the grid, and tapping one jumps straight to that part of the set. A client looking for the ceremony does not have to scroll past the whole morning to find it.

A gallery holds up to 1,000 photos, and galleries are unlimited on the plan, so splitting a huge job across several galleries costs nothing. The ceiling and the advice point the same way: a very large single set is worse to view, worse to pick from and slower to load, on any platform.

A section can also be shared as its own link, which is useful for sending the ceremony to a relative who has no interest in the rest. Picking and downloads are switched off on a section-only link, so send the main gallery link to anyone whose choices you actually want.

The rest of the proofing round, deadlines included, is covered in the complete guide to client photo proofing.

Every figure and behaviour on this page is a fact about this product, verified in the application code on 11 September 2026. No third-party number is quoted, so the sources below are this product's own pages.

• clientgallery.io pricing and FAQ, one plan at $10 a month or $100 a year, unlimited galleries under fair use, Face Search included: https://clientgallery.io/ (checked 11 September 2026)
• Delivering Photos to Clients: The Complete Guide, for full-resolution handoff and delivery tradeoffs: https://clientgallery.io/guides/photo-delivery (checked 11 September 2026)
• Client Photo Proofing: The Complete Guide, for pick levels and proofing rounds: https://clientgallery.io/guides/client-photo-proofing (checked 11 September 2026)
• Why Is My Client Gallery So Slow to Load, for the proof and full-resolution split and the 1,000 photo per gallery ceiling: https://clientgallery.io/guides/why-client-gallery-slow (checked 11 September 2026)