Migration
How to Migrate Pixieset Galleries in Batches
The import can be run again, and a second run skips everything it already brought over. That single behaviour is what turns a migration from an event into a set of errands you do when you have twenty minutes.
Updated September 2026
The reason most studios put off leaving a gallery platform is not the price and not the features. It is the picture in their head of a single terrifying afternoon: a progress bar, eight years of collections, a wedding client emailing halfway through, and no way to stop without leaving the whole thing in pieces.
That picture does not match how this import behaves. It runs from one bookmark you click while you are signed in to your Pixieset dashboard, and it brings the whole account over. Run it again a month later and it skips everything it already imported. There are no duplicates and no partial state to clean up. You can move the last two seasons this week and the older material whenever you feel like it.
This page is about sequencing that. Which galleries earn a place in the first pass, which ones can wait a year, what you keep paying for while both accounts are live, and what the import does not carry, so nothing surprises you at the end. If your revenue runs through Pixieset's print store or its studio manager, the honest answer is that you should not move at all, and the last section before the sources explains why.
What a staged move actually is
The import is a read. You click a bookmark from your Pixieset dashboard, it walks the account, and it copies what it finds into your studio here. Nothing is written back to Pixieset, nothing is deleted there, and no Pixieset password reaches clientgallery.io.
Because it writes nothing, a run is not a commitment. The consequence that matters for planning is the second one: re-running the import skips anything already imported. A second pass brings only what the first pass did not, so you never end up with the same wedding sitting in your studio twice.
Put those two together and the migration stops being a project. There is no cut-over moment, no freeze window, no evening blocked off. Your Pixieset collections keep working the entire time, because nothing about them changed, and Pixieset states that collections stay online for as long as you have an active subscription, or until you delete them yourself, and that they do not expire unless the Auto-Expiry feature is used.
That last clause is the one exception worth acting on early, and it is covered in the order below.
What moves first, and what can wait
The instinct is to sort by date and start at the top. That is the wrong sort. The right question is whether a human being is going to open that gallery again, and roughly when.
| Gallery | Pass | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Delivered in the last 30 days | First | The client is still picking, still downloading, still forwarding the link to family. This is the only group with real urgency. |
| Collections with an expiry date set | First | Pixieset states an expired collection is set to Hidden status and clients can no longer view the images. Move those before the date, not after. |
| Anything a client may reopen this season | First | Holiday cards, a wedding still inside its first year, a family that reorders every autumn. |
| The last two seasons | Second | Low traffic, but these are the galleries you cite in enquiries and the ones a past client half remembers. |
| Everything older | Last, whenever | A four-year-old portrait session nobody has opened since. There is no deadline on this group at all. |
| Collections earning print-store revenue | Do not move | There is no print store here and no commission, because there is nothing to take a commission from. See the section below. |
Notice that age is a proxy and a bad one. A two-week-old commercial job that has already been approved and paid is less urgent than a wedding from eighteen months ago whose clients are about to order an album.
A sequence you can run around a working week
Four passes. None of them has to happen on a particular day, and the gap between them can be a week or a year.
| Pass | What you do | What to check before you stop |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Create the studio, claim your subdomain, run the import once. Your first gallery is free, so you can see the result before paying anything. | Open two or three live galleries as a client would. Check the photo order, the password gate and the jump bar across sections. |
| 2 | Tidy the welcome note, which is where the event date and any set descriptions landed. There is no cover photo field and no collection description field here, so anything that lived in one of those is a sentence you rewrite rather than a field you refill. | Only do this for the galleries in the first group. Editing the welcome note on a 2021 session is wasted labour. |
| 3 | Send the new link only for new work. Leave the links your clients already have alone; they still work on the Pixieset side. | Point your own site and enquiry replies at the new galleries, so new traffic lands in one place. |
| 4 | Re-run the import whenever you like to sweep up the older material. It skips what is already here. | Only once this pass is done, and once you have pulled any originals you still want, does the billing question come up. |
One difference to warn returning clients about, if you send them a new link. Pixieset states that by default each collection requires visitors to enter a four digit PIN in order to download. Here there is no PIN and no client account at any point. If a gallery has a password, the client types that once and the same gate also guards the whole-gallery ZIP and the full-resolution download. If it does not, the link is the access.
What comes across, and what does not
Nobody minds a migration losing something. They mind finding out afterwards. Here is the full list.
| Item | Carried | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| Gallery title | Yes | Kept as the gallery name. |
| Photo order | Yes | The sequence you arranged is preserved. |
| Sets | Yes, conditionally | Reproduced as sections, and only when a collection has more than one set. The client sees one scrolling page with a jump bar at the top. |
| Gallery password | Yes | Carried over. The gate here is server-side and also guards the ZIP, the full-resolution download and the face-search index. |
| Event date | Not as a field | Placed in the gallery's welcome note instead. |
| Set descriptions | Not as fields | Also placed in the welcome note. |
| Cover photo | No | There is no cover photo field here at all. |
| Collection description | No | There is no collection description field here. |
| Photos | Yes, at web size | Brought at Pixieset's largest web size. Read the paragraph below before you plan anything around this. |
The import brings your photos at Pixieset's largest web size, never the original file. This is the single most important sentence on the page. It is a proof-quality JPEG, which is exactly what a client gallery is for, and it is not your master. A migration moves your delivery, not your archive, and it is not a way to recover originals you no longer hold.
So decide what you want to do about originals on purpose, before the billing question arrives. Pixieset states that as a Pixieset user you can download photos from your collection in the same way your clients would, that the download is processed asynchronously and arrives as a ZIP by email, and that for very large collections downloads may be split into multiple ZIP files. It states that original resolution can be offered on any upgraded Client Gallery or Suite plan, with the original file providing the photo exactly as uploaded, with no compression or resizing. That download is documented collection by collection, which is worth knowing if you have several hundred of them. Pixieset also states that download links are designed to expire after 7 days for security purposes, and that a new download can simply be generated.
Whatever you pull, it belongs on your own drives and your own backups. clientgallery.io hosts JPEG proofs for delivery and is not an archive. Uploads accept JPG and PNG, there is no RAW and no video, and that limit is a large part of why the price is flat. For handing finished files to a client, you upload your own full-resolution ZIP per gallery: the client's link is live for 3 days per handoff and you can re-upload it any time someone asks again.
What you keep paying for while both are running
A staged move means two subscriptions overlap for a while. That overlap is the price of not doing it in one sitting, and it is usually a small price, but it should be a decision rather than an accident.
Keep Pixieset active until the passes are finished. The import reads your live Pixieset account, so the account needs to be there to read. Pixieset states that cancelling fully ends the subscription and removes access to that product, and that refunds are not issued for account cancellations. It states that yearly plans can be cancelled at the end of the cycle, which makes the end of your current cycle the natural date to aim the last pass at.
Be careful about one thing in particular. No Pixieset help article states what a downgrade does to existing collections or to original-resolution downloads, so do not build a plan that depends on dropping to a cheaper tier and finishing the migration from there. Pixieset also says only that collections are kept for a period of time after a cancelled subscription, without naming a duration, which is another reason to finish the reading before you stop paying rather than after.
On this side the arithmetic is simpler. The first gallery is free, so you can run the first import and look at the result before you decide anything. After that it is 10 $/month or 100 $/year, which is 8.33 $ a month, for unlimited galleries, photos and clients under fair use. There is no per-gallery fee, no storage tier and no print commission. Galleries stay live for as long as the account exists; they are not expired, hidden or moved to an archived state while you are a customer.
Galleries live at yourname.clientgallery.io, the only header on a client-facing page is your own logo or name, and there is no footer and no platform branding on any plan.
Who should not migrate at all
If a meaningful share of your revenue comes through Pixieset's print store or its studio manager, stay where you are. This is not a hedge. clientgallery.io has no print store, no product catalogue, no fulfilment, no invoicing, no contracts and no client management. Moving your galleries here would move them away from the thing that earns.
Payment here is deliberately thin: you paste your own payment link, a button to pay appears beside the download, and you can switch downloads off until you have been paid. The unlock is manual. You flip it yourself once the money has landed. For a studio that bills by invoice and sells albums in person, that is enough and the flat price is the point. For a studio built on gallery-driven print sales, it is a downgrade in the only area that matters.
There is also a middle case worth naming. Some studios keep the print-selling collections on Pixieset and move only the plain delivery work here, which the staged import handles perfectly well, since it never has to be all or nothing. Two tools costs more than one, so do that with your eyes open and only if the print revenue justifies it.
If you want the shape of the move rather than the order of it, the switching guide covers what changes for your clients, and the export guide covers what Pixieset's own export button does and does not produce.
Sources
Every Pixieset statement above was read from Pixieset's own help centre on 12 September 2026 and is cited with the article's own update date, because that is the date Pixieset last stood behind the wording. Pixieset per-tier prices and storage figures are not published on pages that can be read without an account, so none are stated here. The clientgallery.io plan and fair-use figures were checked in the running product on 12 September 2026.
- Pixieset, "Do my Collections expire?" (collections stay online for as long as the subscription is active or until deleted, and do not expire unless Auto-Expiry is used; after a cancelled subscription collections are kept for a period of time), article updated 14 July 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975012-Do-my-Collections-expire
- Pixieset, "How do I set an Expiry Date to the Gallery?" (an expired collection is set to Hidden status and clients can no longer view the images; the collection is not deleted), article updated 10 August 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003479211-How-do-I-set-an-Expiry-Date-to-the-Gallery
- Pixieset, "Managing your Pixieset subscription" (cancelling fully ends the subscription and removes access to that product; refunds are not issued for account cancellations; yearly plans can be cancelled at the end of the cycle), article updated 11 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003816812-Managing-your-Pixieset-subscription
- Pixieset, "Your client's download experience" (a Pixieset user can download photos from a collection the same way clients would; the download is processed asynchronously and arrives as a ZIP by email; very large collections may be split into multiple ZIP files; a four digit PIN is required by default to download), article updated 12 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003594212-Your-client-s-download-experience
- Pixieset, "Download Sizes - Available Resolutions" (original resolution can be offered on any upgraded Client Gallery or Suite plan; original files provide the photo exactly as uploaded with no compression or resizing), article updated 11 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003793252-Download-Sizes-Available-Resolutions
- Pixieset, "Reviewing Collection Download Activity" (all download links are designed to expire after 7 days for security purposes and a new download can be generated), article updated 25 July 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000930212-Reviewing-Collection-Download-Activity
- Pixieset, "Adding Collection Passwords" (a Collection Password gates the whole gallery; Client Exclusive Access is a separate password from any general Collection Password), article updated 25 July 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002962291-Adding-Collection-Passwords
- Pixieset, "Using folders to share and organize galleries" (a global folder password applies to all collections in the folder; the folder Export produces folder details only and contains no photos or videos), article updated 23 July 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/31178129650957-Using-folders-to-share-and-organize-galleries
- clientgallery.io import behaviour and plan figures (one bookmark from the Pixieset dashboard, whole-account import, re-running skips what is already imported, every call is a read and no Pixieset password is received, photos brought at Pixieset's largest web size, titles and photo order and passwords carried, sets reproduced as sections only when a collection has more than one set, event date and set descriptions placed in the welcome note, no cover photo and no collection description field; 10 $/month or 100 $/year with the first gallery free), checked in the product 12 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/
Frequently asked
Do I have to finish the migration in one sitting?
No. The import can be run as many times as you like and each run skips everything already imported, so there are no duplicates and no partial state to repair. Move the galleries a client might reopen this season now, and leave the older material until whenever suits you.
Do my Pixieset galleries have to stay published while I migrate?
Yes, because the import reads your live Pixieset account. Two things can take a collection out of reach before you get to it: an expiry date, which Pixieset states sets the collection to Hidden status so clients can no longer view the images, and cancelling the subscription, which Pixieset states removes access to that product. Move those collections in the first pass.
Do the links my clients already have stop working?
Nothing changes on the Pixieset side, because every call the import makes is a read. Your existing Pixieset links keep behaving exactly as they did while your subscription is active. The usual approach is to leave old links alone and send the new gallery link only for new work.
Does the import need my Pixieset password?
No. It runs from a bookmark you click while you are already signed in to your Pixieset dashboard. No Pixieset password reaches clientgallery.io, and nothing is written to or deleted from your Pixieset account.
What about collections that used a folder password or Client Exclusive Access?
Pixieset documents several separate kinds of password: a Collection Password on the gallery, a global folder password that applies to all collections inside a folder, Client Exclusive Access as a separate password again, and a four digit download PIN. A gallery here has one password, server-side, that also guards the ZIP and the full-resolution download. Open anything that used a folder-level or client-exclusive password after importing it and confirm the gate is what you want.
Can I use the import to get my original files back?
No. The import brings photos at Pixieset's largest web size, never the original file. Those are proof-quality JPEGs for delivery. Originals belong on your own drives and backups, and Pixieset documents a collection-by-collection download that a photographer can run themselves before cancelling.
Can I move only some of my galleries and keep Pixieset for the rest?
Yes, and some studios do exactly that, keeping print-selling collections on Pixieset while moving plain delivery work across. Two subscriptions cost more than one, so it is worth doing only when the print revenue justifies it.
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