Client Gallery on My Own Domain: What Is Actually Possible

A gallery link has three parts, and photographers tend to argue about all three as if they were one thing. Separating them makes the decision much easier.

Two of the four are yours outright. The middle one is not. Whether that middle one matters depends entirely on who receives your links, and that is a question about your clients rather than about software.

A couple opening a wedding gallery on a phone reads the sender, the cover image and the name of their own shoot. The host is barely registered. A procurement officer reviewing a supplier, a brand team with written rules about where assets may sit, or an agency that has to log where files were shared will read the host first and ask about it. If you shoot for the second group, the domain is a requirement and no amount of logo control substitutes for it.

Photographers who know a little DNS often ask whether they can simply point a record of their own at the gallery and skip the missing feature. The answer is no, and the reason is worth stating so you do not spend an evening on it.

Two things have to happen for a custom domain to serve a page. The record has to point at the right place, which you could do yourself, and the service at the other end has to recognise that hostname, hold a certificate for it and know which studio it belongs to. The second half is the part that does not exist here. A request arriving on a hostname we do not serve fails before any page is rendered, and a studio is found by the name in front of clientgallery.io, not by a lookup of photographer-owned domains, because there is no such lookup and no such field anywhere in the account.

So there is nothing to configure, nothing to request from support, and no workaround that produces a working gallery on a domain you own. Treat it as a settled gap rather than a roadmap item you can push on.

The subdomain is created with the studio. There is no DNS step, no record to copy out of a dashboard, no propagation you have to babysit and no support ticket. You sign up and your address exists.

One subdomain covers the whole account. Every gallery you publish, now and in five years, sits under the same address rather than under a fresh random host per job. A repeat client learns one place your work arrives from, which is most of the value people are chasing when they ask for a custom domain in the first place.

The honest remainder. The word clientgallery is in the address bar. The browser tab icon is ours, since there is no per-studio icon. Neither of those is fixable by paying more, because there is nothing more to pay.

Every gallery can be reached two ways, and both render exactly the same page with exactly the same settings.

The first is the clean one, yourstudio.clientgallery.io/project-name. It is the one to send to clients. The second is a token link on the main domain, of the shape clientgallery.io/g/ followed by a long unguessable string. It is the fallback that always resolves, and it is what sections inside a gallery use.

The practical consequence is simple. Send the subdomain link when you have a choice, because it is the one that reads as yours. Use the token link where you need a link that is immune to anything you might change later.

That last point matters if you rename your studio address. Your address is editable in your studio settings, and the rules are narrow on purpose: lowercase letters and numbers only, three to thirty characters, with accents and punctuation stripped out and a list of reserved words that no studio may claim. Change it and new links use the new address. Links already in a client inbox point at a name that is no longer yours. Pick the address you want to be known by before your first delivery, not after fifty of them.

Your own domain is not absent from the client experience. It just does its job somewhere other than the gallery host, and if you set those places up deliberately the gap narrows considerably.

The email that carries the link is yours. No client invitation is sent by us. You copy the link and send it from your own address, so the message arrives from you@yourstudio.com with your signature under it. The introduction, the part a client reads before clicking anything, is entirely on your domain.

Your site can hold the entry point. A page on your own domain that says where clients find their galleries, linking through to your subdomain, means people who look you up land on you first. It costs nothing and takes ten minutes.

Your portfolio can be embedded on your own site. The subdomain root doubles as a public portfolio when you publish one, and there is a paste-in embed snippet that puts that portfolio grid inside a page on your own domain, in a standard code block, with nothing to install. Note the boundary carefully: this is the portfolio, not client galleries. Galleries stay standalone pages on the subdomain.

The reason this question comes up so often is that branding control is frequently sold as something you climb to. Before you compare monthly prices between any two products in this category, open the feature list of the specific plan you would actually be on, and look for the words that describe removing a badge, adding your own brand, or using your own domain. A headline price tells you nothing if the thing you came for sits a tier or two above it.

Here there is nothing to look up. One plan, $10 a month or $100 a year, which is $8.33 a month annually. Unbranded galleries on your own subdomain are how the product works, not a feature to unlock. There is no print store, no commission on your sales, no per-gallery fee and no storage tier to graduate into.

What else sits on that same plan: unlimited galleries under fair use, face search, a two-way Lightroom Classic plugin that publishes proofs and pulls client picks back into your catalog, one level of sub-galleries, and full-resolution ZIP handoff from your own branded page. Fair use has published numbers rather than vague language.

What is hosted is proof JPEGs, sized for fast viewing. RAW files and master video are not warehoused here, and that trade is what keeps one flat price workable. See the photo delivery guide for how the proof and full-resolution halves fit together in a real handoff.

Some studios should not be talked out of this requirement, and it is faster to say so than to let you discover it in month two.

If a client contract, a brand guideline or a procurement process names the domain assets must be delivered on, you need a product that sells custom domains. Buy one. When you shortlist, check the plan level the feature sits on rather than the headline price, confirm whether the certificate is issued automatically or requires a support request, and ask what happens to links already sent if you later move the domain.

If what you actually want is a client area inside your existing website, under your own navigation and your own domain, that is a website builder with a client area, or web development. It is not gallery branding, and no gallery product will satisfy it by adding a logo upload.

If neither of those describes you, and what you wanted was for the page to look like your studio and stop advertising somebody else, that is available here at the lowest price point in the category, with no tier to climb. The white label guide covers exactly how far the unbranding goes, and the branded portal guide shows how to give a repeat client one permanent branded home without a client login.

Every figure and every behaviour on this page is a fact about this product, verified against its own code and published pages on 11 September 2026. There are no external or competitor figures on this page, so there is nothing here sourced from a third party.

• Plan, price and what is included, clientgallery.io homepage pricing and FAQ. https://clientgallery.io/ Verified 11 September 2026.
• Unbranded client-facing pages, subdomain behaviour and the absence of custom domains, clientgallery.io white label guide. https://clientgallery.io/guides/white-label-client-gallery Verified 11 September 2026.
• Repeat-client structure under one subdomain, clientgallery.io branded portal guide. https://clientgallery.io/guides/branded-client-portal Verified 11 September 2026.
• Proof compression, fair-use ceilings and the full-resolution ZIP handoff, clientgallery.io photo delivery guide. https://clientgallery.io/guides/photo-delivery Verified 11 September 2026.