Let Clients Watch Photos Come In Live During a Photoshoot

A gallery link, and nothing to install. They open the page in a browser. New photos appear in it while you work. There is no call to join, no software on their side, no account to create, and nothing that requires them to sit at a desk. An art director can follow a shoot from a train.

On your side, Live Shoot is a feature of the clientgallery.io iPhone app. The camera's own WiFi app, the one the camera manufacturer publishes, drops frames into the phone's photo library. The clientgallery.io app relays each new photo into the gallery you chose as it arrives. That is the whole chain. The photographer's side of it, including which cameras this works with and how to set the phone up, is covered in the live shoot auto-upload setup guide. This page assumes that part is working and deals with the client end.

Be clear with yourself about what this is not, because a client will ask. It is not tethering. Nothing connects to a camera over USB. There is no desktop watched folder, and the Lightroom plugin does not auto-publish on import. It is iPhone only, and it runs while the app is open in the foreground, which in practice means a phone sitting face-up on the table for the length of the shoot.

Two decisions before you send anything. Which link, and whether it is protected.

Send the parent gallery link. A gallery can hold sections, and a section link is view-only: no comments, no picks, no full-resolution handoff. If you want the client reacting as frames land, the section link cannot carry that conversation. The parent link can.

Turn the gallery password on before the shoot. It is per-gallery and off by default. Server-side it gates the gallery page, the whole-gallery download, the full-resolution handoff, comments and face search. A section link resolves to its parent, so one password covers every section of the shoot. There is one honest limit worth knowing: individual proof image URLs are public and do not expire, so the password stops the gallery page from disclosing those URLs, but it does not protect an image URL somebody already holds. For an unreleased campaign, that distinction matters, and the password guide spells out exactly what is gated.

Practical note on access: comments are gated by the same password, so the client needs it to react at all. Send the link and the password together, in the same message, the day before. A client hunting for a password while the light is good is a client who stops watching.

This is the craft, and it is almost all of the value on this page. A client watching a live feed is watching unculled frames. They will see the blink. They will see the test exposure. They will see the moment the model was mid-sentence. If you have not framed that in advance, they will react to it as though it were your work.

Send something close to this before the shoot starts:

• What the feed is. Raw frames as they come off the camera, in the order they were shot. Not selects. Not edited. Not colour corrected.
• What it is for. Confirming direction. Styling, prop placement, wardrobe, whether the concept is landing. Things that are cheap to change while the set is still up.
• What it is not for. Judging a face, a blink, an expression or the final look. Those come from the edited selection later.
• How to flag something. One channel, chosen in advance. A comment on the frame, or a message to the producer. Not both, and not a phone call to the photographer holding the camera.

Give the reactions a route that does not interrupt you. On a crewed job, the client comments in the gallery and the producer or the assistant reads them. On a small job where you are alone, tell the client you will check comments between setups, and then actually do it. A comment nobody answers for two hours reads as being ignored.

Letting a client watch unculled frames is a decision with consequences, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by default. Some clients read a live feed the way you do, as raw material. Others read every frame as a proposal, and you will spend the afternoon defending shots you were never going to deliver.

The alternative costs you almost nothing. Shoot the setup, take thirty seconds between changes, and publish a curated batch every twenty minutes or so. The client still gets a link that fills through the day. They just get the version of the shoot you would defend. On a nervous client, a first-time client, or a shoot with a lot of technical throwaway frames, the curated batch is the better call.

Rough guide to which mode fits:

Tell the client this in one sentence at the start, and you will not have to explain it under pressure later. The relay depends on three things holding.

• The phone stays awake and in the foreground. The app relays while it is open on screen. Someone picking the phone up to answer a text pauses the feed.
• The camera's WiFi holds. The manufacturer's app is what gets frames onto the phone. If that connection drops, nothing reaches the gallery until it comes back.
• The venue connection carries it. A basement, a concrete trade show hall or a rural location slows everything down. Photos still arrive. They arrive later.

Because of that, do not promise a client that frames appear the second you press the shutter. Promise that the gallery keeps filling through the day. The setup guide covers how to test the chain the day before, which is the single best defence against explaining a stall to a client in real time.

A remote client watching a browser is looking at proof JPEGs sized for fast viewing, on whatever screen they happen to have, in whatever light they happen to be sitting in. That is fine for direction. It is not fine for a decision that depends on critical focus, fine detail or exact colour.

If somebody has to sign off on sharpness, skin retouching, or colour against a reference, they need to be in the room, on a tethered monitor, or reviewing on a calibrated display after the shoot. Say that out loud when a client asks whether they can approve final selects from the live gallery. The answer is no, and the honest version of the answer protects you when a frame that looked fine on a phone turns out to be soft.

What the live gallery replaces is the screen share and the video call pointed at a monitor. That is a genuine win. It is not a replacement for critical review, and selling it as one is how you end up reshooting.

The useful part happens after everyone goes home. The gallery that filled during the shoot is already the gallery the client knows. You cull it down, add the edited selects, and the selection round happens in the same place the client was already watching. Their live reactions and their picks live on one page, under your studio name, on your own subdomain, with no platform badge on it.

Practical housekeeping for that transition. Delete or hide the throwaway frames before you invite picks, so the client is choosing from work rather than from everything. Split by setup into sections if the day produced a lot, remembering that sections are one level deep and that section links are view-only. Then send the parent link again with a clear instruction about how many to pick.

Fair use worth knowing while you plan a heavy shoot day: a gallery holds up to 1,000 photos, and galleries are unlimited, so a long shoot simply continues into a second gallery. A paid account holds 250 GB of proofs. Free accounts hold 5 GB and one gallery. Full-resolution delivery is a separate paid step: you upload a full-resolution ZIP per gallery, it stays live for three days per handoff and can be re-uploaded any time, within 100 GB of standing ZIPs per account. The hosted gallery itself never expires. The end-to-end version of that handoff is in the photo delivery guide.