Auto-Upload Photos to an Online Gallery During a Live Shoot

Tethered capture exists for a specific reason: critical review. A retoucher checking skin at 100 percent, a client signing off on a hero frame, a stylist watching for a fold in a garment. That job needs full-resolution files on a calibrated display, arriving with the camera under the software's control.

Live Shoot is not built for that. It is built for showing people what is happening. The images that reach the gallery are proof JPEGs sized for fast viewing, and the audience is usually looking at a phone. That is the right tool for a wedding party, an event organiser or a client who wants to feel included, and the wrong tool for a commercial set where a frame gets approved or rejected on detail.

A studio can run both. Tether the hero setups into the laptop for approval, and run Live Shoot alongside it for the people who are not standing at the cart. They answer different questions and they do not compete.

Live Shoot is a feature of the clientgallery.io iPhone app. It is a relay, not a capture system, and the chain has two links.

Link one: camera to phone. Your camera's own WiFi app, meaning the app published by the camera manufacturer, connects to the camera and drops frames into the phone's photo library. That link belongs entirely to the manufacturer. clientgallery.io does not talk to your camera and has no part in this step.

Link two: phone to gallery. The clientgallery.io app watches the phone's photo library for each new photo and relays it into the gallery you chose before the shoot started. Each relayed photo lands in that gallery as the shoot goes on.

The app does this while it is open in the foreground. In practice that means a phone left open on the table, on a cart or in a jacket pocket with the screen awake, running the app and nothing else. Close the app or switch to another one and the relay stops until you come back.

Four things get assumed about a feature like this. All four are wrong here, and it is better to know now than at the venue.

• It is not tethering. Nothing connects to the camera over USB. There is no cable, no camera control, and no capture-one-frame-to-disk behaviour. The camera manufacturer's WiFi app is what reaches the camera, and it does so over the camera's own wireless connection.
• There is no desktop watched folder. No macOS agent and no Windows agent exists. You cannot point clientgallery.io at a folder on a laptop and have it upload whatever appears there. If your workflow depends on a watched folder, this is not the feature you are looking for.
• The Lightroom plugin does not auto-publish on import. The clientgallery.io plugin for Lightroom Classic is an Export service and a Publish Service. Both are things you trigger. Importing a card into Lightroom does not send anything anywhere on its own.
• It is iPhone only, and it does not run in the background. There is no Android version of this feature, and the relay does not continue when the app is backgrounded or the phone sleeps.

Said plainly: this is a phone relaying photos that a manufacturer's app already put in its camera roll. Everything useful about it follows from that, and so does every limitation.

The setup is short, but every step of it has to be done before anyone is watching. Fiddling with a WiFi pairing screen while a wedding party waits is the failure mode this section exists to prevent.

• Pair the camera with the manufacturer's app first. Confirm that a test frame actually arrives in the phone's photo library. If it does not arrive there, nothing else in the chain matters.
• Create the gallery ahead of time and pick it in the app. Choose the destination before the first frame, not after. Name it for the client and the event, not for the date.
• Plug the phone in and keep the screen awake. A phone running a camera WiFi connection and an upload relay for two hours will drain. Battery pack, cable, screen on, auto-lock off.
• Leave the app in the foreground. Not the camera app, not messages, not the venue's WiFi login page. The clientgallery.io app, open, on top.
• Test the whole chain once, end to end. Shoot one frame, watch it reach the phone, then open the gallery link on a second device and confirm it is there. Do this the day before if you can, and again on site before the client walks in.

Two links, four common failures. None of them are exotic, and all of them are visible to the client as the same symptom: the gallery stops growing.

A basement hall, a stone church and a trade-show floor are all places where the second link is the weak one. Walk the room first, find where the phone holds a connection, and leave it there.

Because the relay depends on the phone staying awake and in front, treat it as a bonus, not as the delivery. Your card is still the record of the shoot. If the relay stops halfway through, you have lost a nice moment for the client, not the job.

They see a gallery filling as the shoot goes on. Each relayed photo lands in the gallery you picked, under your studio's own subdomain, carrying your logo, your colours and your fonts. There is no platform badge and no link back to us on any client-facing page.

Send the parent gallery link. A section link inside a gallery is view-only, so the parent link is the one that gives people the whole experience. One link, sent once, works for the rest of the event and afterwards, because hosted galleries do not expire.

If the room is not the whole audience, put a password on the gallery. It is per gallery and off by default. On the server it gates the gallery page, the whole-gallery ZIP, the full-resolution ZIP, comments and face search, and a section link resolves to its parent so one password covers every section. Worth being exact about the limit: individual proof image URLs are public and do not expire, so the password stops the gallery page from disclosing those URLs but does not protect an image URL that somebody already holds.

Set expectations in one sentence when you send the link. Something like: photos will appear here through the evening, and the finished set follows later. That turns a half-full gallery from a bug into a feature.

A live shoot can produce a lot of frames in a short window, so know the ceilings before you hit one in front of a client.

If you expect to cross a thousand frames, plan the split in advance: one gallery for the ceremony, one for the reception, one per day of a conference. Deciding that at the start is easier than discovering it at frame 1,001.

What lands in the gallery are proof JPEGs sized for fast viewing. clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video, which is what keeps the price flat. Full-resolution delivery is a separate, paid step you do after the shoot: you upload a full-resolution ZIP for the gallery, and it stays live for three days per handoff and can be re-uploaded any time.

Compressed into the order you actually do it:

• The day before. Create the gallery. Set the password if you need one. Pair the camera and the manufacturer's app. Relay one test frame and open the gallery on a different device.
• On arrival. Check the connection at the spot where the phone will live. Plug the phone in, turn auto-lock off, open the app, select the gallery.
• First frame. Shoot one, confirm it reaches the gallery, then send the parent link with a sentence about what to expect.
• During. Glance at the phone when you change setups. If the gallery stopped growing, the fix is almost always the camera pairing or the app being backgrounded.
• After. Do the real edit from the cards. The relayed frames were the preview. The finished set is the delivery.

Used this way, the feature does one thing well: it lets people see the shoot while it is happening, under your name, without you stopping to send anything.