Commercial delivery
How to Deliver Final Images to an Ad Agency
A commercial handoff has more moving parts than a portrait job: several people review at once, the selects have to survive a retouch cycle, and the final files are far too large for email.
Updated 2026-09-07
Delivering to an ad agency is not the same job as delivering to a couple. The people reviewing your work are not one client. They are an art director, a producer, an account lead, and often the end brand, and they look at the same set on the same afternoon. The selection they land on is not the end of the job either. It becomes a retouch brief, and the retouched files come back for a second look before anyone signs off.
That is three separate handoffs on one project: the review set, the selects list, and the final files. This guide walks through all three in order, names the places agency jobs actually break, and is honest about the situation where none of this applies, because the agency runs its own asset system and simply wants the files inside it.
What an agency needs from you, in order
Agencies are not vague about deliverables. They are vague about process. The deliverables are usually written into the estimate: a number of finished images, at a stated resolution, cleared for stated usage. What is rarely written down is how the choosing happens, and that gap is where a week disappears.
Three things have to happen, in this sequence:
- Review. The agency sees everything worth seeing from the shoot, in an order you control, and marks what it wants.
- Selects. The marks become a list of filenames you can act on without transcribing anything by hand.
- Signoff and handoff. The retouched files go over at full resolution, once, in a form the agency can archive.
Run these as one gallery with three states rather than three separate sends. Every extra link you email is another place a stakeholder can look at the wrong version.
Step 1: one branded gallery, sectioned the way the job was briefed
The review set should look like it came from your studio, not from a file service. On clientgallery.io the page the agency opens carries your logo, your studio name, your colours and your fonts, and it lives on your own subdomain, in the shape yourname.clientgallery.io. There is no platform name, badge, footer or link anywhere on it. That matters more on commercial work than on consumer work, because your page is being screen shared in a client meeting you are not in.
Divide the set the way the brief is divided. A gallery can be split into sections, and the agency sees them as named blocks on one page with a jump bar across the top, in the order you arranged them. Name them after the shot list: hero, packaging, lifestyle, talent. An art director scanning for one deliverable then jumps straight to it instead of scrolling past four hundred frames.
Put a password on it. The check runs on the server: without the password the page returns nothing but the prompt, and the photos are never queried and never reach the page source. The same gate covers the whole-gallery download and the full-resolution handoff, which is the part that matters when the work is an unreleased campaign.
One practical ceiling to plan around: a gallery holds up to 1,000 photos. For a commercial job that is generous, and you should be nowhere near it. Send the frames you would defend in the room, not the whole card.
Step 2: two pick levels, so a maybe is not a yes
A single favourite button is the reason agency selects rounds go twice. The art director marks forty images meaning "keep these in play", you read forty images meaning "retouch these", and the correction costs a day.
clientgallery.io gives the reviewer two levels instead of one. A star is level one, a heart is level two. A single tap stars a photo, a double tap loves it, and tapping the level a photo already has clears it. In the lightbox they are two labelled buttons. A running tray at the bottom of the page shows the two counts side by side as the review goes on.
Assign the meaning in the email that carries the link, and keep it to one sentence. Star means shortlisted, heart means approved for retouch. Now the shortlist and the approval live in the same pass instead of in two rounds.
Nobody creates an account. The link is the login, plus the gallery password if you set one. When the reviewer is done they press Send my picks and type a name and an email, and a confirmation warns them that sending locks the selection. You get an email and a push notification the moment it lands, and the dashboard flips to show who sent them.
Be clear-eyed about the multi-stakeholder part. The picks are one shared list on the gallery, not a separate list per person, and the send locks it once. That is fine and often better, because the agency arrives at one answer rather than three, but it needs a named owner. Tell the producer that everyone can mark, and that one person presses send when the room agrees. If you need three genuinely separate opinions, give each reviewer their own gallery and reconcile the lists yourself.
Step 3: turn the selects into a retouch list
The selects have to survive the retouch cycle. That means they have to leave the gallery as filenames, not as a set of thumbnails you squint at while you work.
Once the agency has sent its picks, the gallery grows an Export picks (.txt) button. It downloads a plain newline-separated list of the picked filenames, loved first, then starred, named after the gallery. That file goes to your retoucher, or into the job folder, or into the estimate revision when the count came back higher than the estimate covered. It is the shape any tool can read, which is the point for anyone culling in Capture One or Hasselblad Phocus.
If you work in Lightroom Classic, the round trip is closer. The plugin publishes the shoot straight from the catalog, and when the picks come back one command pulls them in by filename: starred photos rated three stars, loved photos rated five and flagged as picks, and the whole selection gathered into a collection named after the gallery. Any per-photo comments the reviewer left come back with them. Re-exporting the same shoot after the retouch replaces each photo in place rather than duplicating it, so the retouched version lands in the same gallery with the picks still attached.
Step 4: the full-resolution handoff at signoff
The review set is not the deliverable. Photos in a gallery are compressed in your own browser into proof JPEGs of roughly 0.6 MB each, which is right for judging a frame and wrong for a billboard. The deliverable is a separate object: one full-resolution ZIP per gallery that you upload when the retouch is signed off.
It behaves as a handoff, not as storage. Here are the numbers that govern it, all enforced in the product.
| Thing | Figure |
|---|---|
| Full-resolution ZIPs per gallery | 1 |
| How long a ZIP stays live | 3 days per handoff |
| Re-uploads of that ZIP | Any time, clock restarts |
| Standing ZIPs per account | 100 GB |
| Photos per gallery | 1,000 |
| Proof storage, paid account | 250 GB |
| Proof storage, free account | 5 GB |
| Plan | 10 $ a month, or 100 $ a year, which is 8.33 $ a month |
The three days apply to the ZIP alone. The gallery itself does not expire, and the proofs stay online for as long as the account exists. If the agency misses the window, you re-upload the same file and the clock starts again, at no cost and with no support ticket. That is the difference between an expiring deliverable and an expiring transfer: one is a button you press again, the other is a file that is gone.
The agency can also take the review set itself, either the whole gallery as one ZIP or any single image on its own, and you can switch that off per gallery. One honest limit: the off switch is enforced on the server for the whole-gallery ZIP, while the per-photo download button is only hidden. Treat it as a courtesy setting, not as a lock.
To know whether the handoff actually landed, the dashboard shows a dot on each gallery card, green when the client has opened it and red when nobody has, with a filter for the ones nobody has opened yet. The clients view adds whether the ZIP was downloaded and when the last activity was. Picks sent and ZIP downloads are the two events that push a notification to your phone.
What WeTransfer and Dropbox do instead
These are the two tools an agency will suggest, and both are competent at the thing they were built for. WeTransfer publishes an explicit lossless claim: it states that it uses lossless compression and that files are never altered or reduced in quality during the transfer process. Nobody should tell you it damages your files. The mismatch is elsewhere, and it is about shape and about time.
| Question | WeTransfer | Dropbox shared folder | clientgallery.io |
|---|---|---|---|
| How long the link lives | Up to 3 days on Free and Starter; Ultimate keeps transfers active as long as you like | No expiry unless set per link, on the plans that offer it | Gallery does not expire; the full-resolution ZIP lives 3 days per handoff |
| Volume allowed | Free: 10 transfers or 3 GB per 30-day rolling window. Starter: 10 transfers or 300 GB. Ultimate: unlimited transfers up to 1 TB each | Basic 2 GB free; Plus CA$12.99 a month for 2 TB, for 1 person | 1,000 photos per gallery, 250 GB of proofs, 100 GB of standing ZIPs |
| Can the reviewer mark choices | Comments on previews (WeTransfer publishes no photo-marking or selection feature) | Not published | Two levels, star and heart, with a running count |
| Whose brand the agency sees | WeTransfer, with an optional branded background and a personal subdomain for receiving files | Dropbox | Yours, on your own subdomain, with no platform branding |
| In-browser preview ceiling | Images up to 256 MB each; video MP4 and MOV up to 300 MB each | Images 100 to 200 MB or 50 megapixels; .psd up to 1024 MB | Proofs are served as the gallery, at roughly 0.6 MB each |
Dropbox prices above are the Canadian storefront, in Canadian dollars, as published on the day this page was written.
Two details are worth holding onto. WeTransfer starts its availability countdown from the moment the transfer is sent, not from the first download, so a Friday send is already half spent by the time an agency opens it on Monday. And recovering an expired transfer is available only on the Ultimate, Teams and Enterprise plans, where files larger than 256 MiB can be recovered for up to 90 days after expiry. Every real campaign deliverable is in that larger bucket.
Dropbox is the opposite failure. A shared folder does not expire on its own, which is good, but it is a folder. Dropbox publishes no picks or selection mechanism for one, so the agency's marks end up in a spreadsheet or an email thread instead of on the images. Expiration dates and link passwords are also plan-gated: Dropbox lists them for Professional, Essentials, Standard, Advanced, Business, Business Plus and Enterprise.
When you should not use a gallery at all
Some agencies run a locked-down digital asset manager, or a shared workspace the whole account team already lives in, with metadata rules, naming conventions and a rights field that has to be filled before an image is usable. When that is the situation, deliver into their system. Ask for the upload path, the naming convention and the required fields, and follow them exactly. A gallery product that fights an agency's asset system creates a second copy of the truth, and the second copy is always the one someone ships by mistake.
The same applies to a one-frame job. If the deliverable is a single retouched file for an art director who already approved it on set, send the file. A review gallery for one image is ceremony.
Where the gallery earns its place is the middle: a shoot with more frames than anyone wants to scroll in a folder, several people deciding at once, a retouch cycle between the choosing and the delivering, and a final set too large for email.
Sources
- WeTransfer, Plan limits. https://wetransfer.com/help-center/subscriptions/plan-limits (fetched 2026-09-07)
- WeTransfer, Transfer availability. https://wetransfer.com/help-center/how-to/transfer-availability (fetched 2026-09-07)
- WeTransfer, What are previews. https://wetransfer.com/help-center/how-to/what-is-previews (fetched 2026-09-07)
- WeTransfer, File size difference. https://wetransfer.com/help-center/how-to/file-size-difference (fetched 2026-09-07)
- WeTransfer, Download an expired transfer. https://wetransfer.com/help-center/how-to/download-expired-transfer (fetched 2026-09-07)
- WeTransfer, Personal page overview. https://wetransfer.com/help-center/how-to/personal-page-overview (fetched 2026-09-07)
- WeTransfer, Comments on previews. https://wetransfer.com/help-center/how-to/comments-on-previews (fetched 2026-09-07)
- Dropbox, Plans. https://www.dropbox.com/plans (fetched 2026-09-07)
- Dropbox, Set shared link permissions. https://help.dropbox.com/share/set-link-permissions (fetched 2026-09-07)
- Dropbox, File types that preview. https://help.dropbox.com/view-edit/file-types-that-preview (fetched 2026-09-07)
- clientgallery.io, Lightroom plugin page. https://clientgallery.io/lightroom (fetched 2026-09-07)
- clientgallery.io product behaviour, verified in the product source code on 2026-09-07: pick levels, sub-galleries, server-side password gate, view tracking, filename-list export, fair-use ceilings, and the full-resolution ZIP handoff.
Frequently asked
How do I send full-resolution images to an ad agency when the files are too large for email?
Deliver them as one full-resolution ZIP attached to the gallery the agency already reviewed in. On clientgallery.io that ZIP stays live for three days per handoff, you can re-upload it at any time to restart the clock, and an account can hold 100 GB of live ZIPs at once. The gallery itself does not expire, so the agency keeps the review set even after the ZIP window closes.
How do several agency stakeholders review the same set without three separate rounds?
Send one link and give it two pick levels: a star for shortlisted and a heart for approved for retouch. Everyone marks in the same gallery and a running tray shows both counts. The picks are one shared list rather than a list per person, so name one owner, usually the producer, to press send once the room agrees.
How do the agency's selects reach my retoucher without retyping filenames?
Once the picks are sent, the gallery offers an Export picks (.txt) button that downloads a plain newline-separated list of the picked filenames, loved first then starred. If you work in Lightroom Classic, the plugin pulls the same selection into the catalog by filename, rates starred photos three stars and loved photos five, flags them, and gathers them into a collection named after the gallery.
Is WeTransfer good enough for an agency handoff?
For a single send with no review it is fine, and WeTransfer publishes an explicit lossless claim, so quality is not the issue. The issues are shape and time: a transfer is a list of files rather than a gallery an art director can mark, and on the Free and Starter plans uploads stay online for up to three days with the countdown starting the moment the transfer is sent, not at first download.
Why not just share a Dropbox folder with the agency?
A Dropbox folder does not expire on its own, which is a real advantage, but Dropbox publishes no picks or selection mechanism for a shared folder, so the agency's marks end up in a spreadsheet or an email thread. Expiration dates and link passwords are also plan-gated, listed for Professional, Essentials, Standard, Advanced, Business, Business Plus and Enterprise.
How do I keep an unreleased campaign private during review?
Put a password on the gallery. The check runs on the server, so without the password the page returns only the prompt and the photos are never queried or placed in the page source. The same gate covers the whole-gallery ZIP and the full-resolution handoff, and a separate kill switch can make the link stop resolving entirely while leaving the gallery intact.
When should I skip a gallery and deliver into the agency's own system?
When the agency runs a locked-down digital asset manager or a shared workspace with naming conventions and required rights fields. Ask for the upload path and the conventions, and follow them. Duplicating the files into a gallery as well creates a second copy of the truth, and the second copy is the one that gets shipped by mistake.
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