A Client Gallery for Commercial Photographers

On a wedding job the gallery link goes to two people. On a commercial job it gets forwarded. The person who commissioned you sends it to the art director, who sends it to the brand manager, who sends it to the agency producer, who pastes it into a channel where a dozen more people open it.

That forwarding is the whole marketing argument for unbranded delivery. Every one of those people is looking at a page that either says your studio or says somebody else's software. If the page carries a platform logo, a platform footer or a platform domain, you have handed a room full of buyers a reminder that you rent your delivery from a vendor.

Here, galleries live at your own subdomain, in the form yourname.clientgallery.io. The only header on a client-facing gallery page is your own logo or your studio name, and there is no footer at all. There is no platform branding on any client-facing page, and that is true on every plan rather than being the thing the top tier unlocks. Subdomain provisioning is best-effort, so a share link falls back to the form clientgallery.io/g/{token} until DNS settles.

The same logic applies to the furniture around the photos. There is no print store on this product and no commission taken on anything. On a family job a store is a revenue line. On a commercial job it is noise in front of a buyer, and a print-ordering button next to a product shot reads as a studio that does not usually work for brands. If print sales are a real part of your income, that absence is a reason to stay where you are, and the white-label guide goes further into what unbranded does and does not cover.

A wedding gallery reads chronologically because the day had an order and the client lived through it. A commercial set has no such spine. What it has is a shot list, and the shot list is what the client is checking the delivery against.

So the organising unit is the deliverable. Campaign hero. Packshots. Lifestyle. Talent portraits. Behind the scenes. Detail crops for social. The client opens the set and immediately sees whether every line of the brief came back.

In the studio here those are called sections, and you build them by naming a section and moving photos into it. Be clear about what the client actually sees, because it is not a tree of nested pages. The client gets one scrolling page with a jump-to bar at the top. Tapping a section name jumps down the page to that section. There is nothing to open, nothing to navigate into and no level to come back up from. For a reviewer moving fast through a set on a phone, that is the better behaviour anyway.

A section also has its own standalone share link, which is the part that matters for corporate headshots and for sponsor deliverables. You can send one sitter their own section without giving them the rest of the company. Know the trade before you rely on it: that standalone section page is view-only. There is no whole-gallery ZIP on it, no picks, no full-resolution download, no face search, and no link back to the parent gallery. It is a way to show a slice of the set, not a second front door into the job.

The per-gallery ceiling is 1,000 photos. For most commercial deliveries that is not a constraint you will meet. A catalogue shoot that runs past it splits into a second gallery, which costs nothing because galleries are not counted and not charged for.

A heart is the wrong vocabulary for this client. An art director is not expressing affection for a frame. They are selecting the set that goes to retouch, and what they want at the end of that exercise is a list they can send you and you can act on without transcribing anything.

The mechanic is deliberately small. One tap is a star. Two taps is a love. Two levels, nothing else to learn, and enough to separate "in the selects" from "this is the one". On a commercial job the natural mapping is star for the shortlist and love for the frame that runs.

What turns that into a working retouch brief is the export. Every completed gallery has a one-tap Export picks button that downloads a .txt file of the original filenames, one per line. That is the list you paste into a retouch brief, a purchase order or an email to the retoucher. One honest limitation: the .txt file does not distinguish stars from loves. If that distinction matters to your billing, you need to read the levels in the gallery itself and not from the file.

If you finish in Lightroom Classic, the plugin closes the loop without a list at all. Stars come back as a 3-star rating. Loves come back as a 5-star rating plus a Pick flag. Both are gathered into a collection named after the gallery, inside a collection set. Colour labels are a separate feature on the client side and are not part of that write-back. The plugin is Lightroom Classic only, because the cloud Lightroom app takes no plugins at all.

Two more things happen once picks are sent. Social crops become available: one tap re-cuts every pick to Story 9:16, Post 4:5, Square 1:1 or Wide 16:9 and saves them. On a computer the files land in the Downloads folder. That is genuinely useful when the marketing team needs the same approved frame in four aspect ratios by Friday. It is not in the photo zoom view and it is not available before picks are sent.

On a commercial job the proofs are the middle of the process, not the end. Somebody downstream needs the actual files. Usually that is a retoucher, sometimes a picture desk, sometimes the brand's own internal library team.

Two different downloads exist here and they should not be confused. The client can take the whole gallery in one click as a ZIP of every proof, numbered in order, or take any single image. Proofs are browser-compressed JPEGs, which makes that a fine way to move a set around for layout and comping and a poor way to deliver finals.

The finals are a separate act. You upload your own full-resolution ZIP for the gallery, built the way you want it built, and the client's link to it is live for 3 days per handoff. You can re-upload it any time, and replacing a ZIP frees its space before the new one lands. The standing pool is 100 GB of live ZIPs per account, and only live ZIPs count toward it. Full-resolution delivery is a paid-plan feature and the gate is enforced server-side.

A three-day window is a real constraint and it deserves a plain sentence rather than a footnote. This is a handoff, not a library. If the agency comes back in March for a file you delivered in January, you re-upload the ZIP and send the link again. What you should not do is plan a workflow in which the brand treats your gallery as the place their assets permanently live.

The no-account rule is worth stating twice for this audience. A client never creates an account at any point, which means nobody at the agency has to be provisioned, invited or password-reset before they can see the work. On a commercial job that removes the single most common reason a delivery stalls for two days.

One format constraint you need before you build a workflow on this. Uploads accept JPG and PNG. There is no RAW and no video. This product hosts JPEGs and does not warehouse RAW files or master video, and that is the direct reason the price stays flat. If your commercial delivery is motion, or if the agency contract obliges you to hand over RAW, the ZIP handoff is the wrong shape for you and you should keep whatever you use for large-file transfer.

On invoicing, one thing must not be overstated. You can paste your own payment link and a "Pay your invoice" button appears beside the download, and downloads can be switched off until you have been paid. The unlock is manual. Nothing detects a payment and nothing opens by itself, so you switch downloads back on when the money lands.

An unreleased campaign, an unannounced product or a talent contract with a publication date turns a delivery link into a leak risk. Most photographers handle this with a password, and the useful question is what the password actually covers.

Passwords here are set per gallery, either in the studio or in the Lightroom Classic export dialog so the gallery goes live already password-set. The gate is server-side and it gates the files, not only the page. That means it also guards the whole-gallery ZIP, the full-resolution download and the face-search index. A password that only hides a page while the files stay reachable is not much of a password, and this one is not that.

Face Search is off by default and turned on per gallery, which is the correct default for commercial work. When it is on, matching runs entirely in the guest's own browser and the selfie is never uploaded. For an event or a conference shoot with hundreds of attendees it can save real hours. For an unreleased campaign, leave it off.

Two more habits fit this job. Use a section's standalone view-only link when somebody needs to see one slice and nothing else. And use the opened indicator on each gallery tile in the studio, with its All, Seen by client and Not opened yet filters, to know whether the person you sent it to has actually looked. That is a chase-the-client tool, not a security tool.

Be accurate about what the analytics are. They are account-wide, not per gallery. Across the account 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 you need to prove to a brand exactly who inside their building opened which frame, this does not do that and nothing here pretends otherwise.

This is the section most pages like this leave out. A delivery gallery is a narrow tool and commercial photography has requirements that sit outside it. Three of them are common enough to name.

You need per-user permissions. If the agency requires that the producer sees everything, the brand manager sees only the approved selects, and each person is identified by their own login, buy a review or asset tool. There are no client accounts here at all, so there is no per-user model to configure. The controls that exist are per-gallery passwords and per-section links.

You need an approval trail with versions. If the job requires round one against round two, a record of who approved what and when, or a signed-off state you can point at in a dispute, that is a review tool's job. Picks here are a selection mechanic, not an approval log.

You need comments on individual frames. If the art director wants to write "crop tighter left" on frame 214 and have you see it in context, that conversation does not happen inside these galleries. The list comes back as picks and as a .txt of filenames, and the notes come back the way they always did, in an email.

And the broadest one. This is delivery, not asset management. A brand that wants a permanent, searchable, rights-managed home for everything you have ever shot for them needs a digital asset manager, and they should buy one. Hosted proofs stay up for as long as the account exists, which is a real promise and a narrow one, but a delivery gallery organised by job is not a library organised by asset. If what you actually need is a cleaner handoff to one agency rather than a system of record, the agency delivery guide is the more specific read, and the photo delivery guide covers the whole workflow from upload to final files.

This page states no competitor figure and no external statistic, so there is nothing third-party to cite. Every product fact above is a clientgallery.io plan or fair-use figure checked against the running product on 12 September 2026: the flat plan at 10 $/month or 100 $/year with the first gallery free; no print store and no commission; 1,000 photos per gallery; 250 GB of proofs on a paid account and 5 GB on a free one; 100 GB of standing full-resolution ZIPs with each handoff link live 3 days and re-uploadable any time; galleries at your own subdomain with no platform branding on client-facing pages; named sections presented to the client as one scrolling page with a jump-to bar; per-gallery server-side passwords that gate the files; one-tap Export picks as a .txt of original filenames; account-wide analytics; and uploads limited to JPG and PNG.