Mini Session Photo Delivery: The Workflow for Twelve Galleries in One Day

Here is one delivery broken into its parts. The middle column is what turns a small task into the whole afternoon. The right column is honest about which of these actually go away.

Read the right column carefully, because the useful claim is narrower than the marketing version of it. Two steps genuinely disappear, two shrink, and three stay exactly as manual as they were. The saving is in removing the export and the upload, not in a bulk tool that names twelve galleries and writes twelve emails for you. Nothing here does that.

The Lightroom Classic plugin is a real publish service rather than an export preset. A published collection is a gallery. You drag a family's selects into their collection, press Publish once, and the gallery exists.

Three behaviours matter on a day with twelve of them. Lightroom tracks New and Modified photos itself, so a second Publish pushes only what changed. The gallery keeps the same link for its whole life, so the email you sent on Saturday still works after Tuesday's correction. Renaming the collection renames the gallery, and deleting the collection takes the gallery down.

The password is the part worth setting up before the day rather than during it. It can be set in the export dialog, which means the gallery is live and already protected from the first second. On a mini day the alternative is publishing twelve open galleries and then going back through the studio to lock each one, which is the sort of small mistake that a repeated workflow makes for you.

Two limits on this. It is Lightroom Classic only, because the cloud Lightroom app takes no plugins. Uploads are JPG and PNG, so renders go up as JPEG in sRGB and no RAW file is involved at any point. That second constraint is what keeps the price flat, and it is a real constraint rather than a footnote: this is a delivery tool, not a place to warehouse masters.

The mechanics of the plugin, including what the pick levels write back into your catalogue, are covered in publishing a gallery straight from Lightroom Classic.

Because sections exist inside a gallery, the tempting shortcut on a mini day is one gallery for the whole Saturday with a section per family. Do not do it, and the reason is specific rather than stylistic.

A section has its own standalone share link, and that page is view-only. There is no whole-gallery ZIP on it, no picking, no full-resolution download and no face search, and no link back to the parent gallery. So a section link hands a family something to look at and nothing to do. Meanwhile the parent gallery link shows every family the whole day, which is the wrong answer for twelve separate paying households.

Sections are for organising one client's shoot. A getting-ready section and a reception section inside one wedding gallery is exactly what they are for, and the client sees one scrolling page with a jump-to bar rather than anything to click into. Twelve unrelated families is not that shape. Give each family their own gallery, which costs nothing, and use the fact that nothing counts them.

The plan is 10 $/month, or 100 $/year, which works out to 8.33 $ a month. Galleries, photos and clients are unlimited under fair use, and the first gallery is free. Nothing on the account is priced by the gallery, so a twelve-family Saturday and a single wedding produce the same invoice.

The ceiling that does exist is a storage pool rather than a gallery count: 250 GB of proofs on a paid account, and 1,000 photos in any one gallery. Mini sessions sit an absurd distance below both. Proofs are browser-compressed JPEGs of roughly 0.6 MB each, so here is what a mini day actually weighs.

The right column is arithmetic, not a promise about your account, and it assumes the whole pool is spent on mini days. The point of the table is the order of magnitude. A studio running two mini days a month is nowhere near the ceiling, and the 1,000-photo per-gallery limit is not a number a fifteen-frame session can see from where it stands.

One thing the flat price does not buy is an archive. Hosted proofs stay live for as long as the account exists, so the family who resurfaces in March still has a working link, but master files belong on your own drives and your own backups. The full arithmetic of the ceilings is in how many client galleries can I have.

On a mini day the download question decides how many emails you get on Sunday evening, so it is worth being precise. There are two downloads and they behave differently.

The everyday download is the first row, and it is the one that removes the Sunday emails, because a family who can take their photos without making an account does not write to you asking how. The third row is a handoff with a window on it, not permanent hosting, and re-uploading a ZIP frees the old one's space before the new one lands. Plan around that rather than around a memory of permanent full-resolution links.

If money is still outstanding on the day, downloads can be switched off on a gallery, and a Pay your invoice button appears beside the download pointing at your own payment link. Be clear on the mechanics: the unlock is manual. Nothing detects the payment and nothing opens by itself, so on a twelve-family day that is twelve decisions you make yourself once the money arrives.

Delivering twelve galleries is finite work. Following up on twelve galleries is not, and it is where mini-session admin quietly doubles. A week later you need to know which four families have not opened theirs, and email inboxes are a poor instrument for that.

Every gallery tile in the studio carries an opened indicator telling you whether that client has opened that gallery, with All, Seen by client and Not opened yet filters across the list. That is a twelve-item problem answered by one filter, and it changes the follow-up email from a nag sent to everyone into a short note sent to four people.

Two more things worth switching on before a mini day. The iOS app sends a push when a client sends their picks, and another when a client downloads the full-resolution ZIP, each on its own switch, so the trickle of activity across a week reaches you without you opening a dashboard. And if the day includes any picking at all, every completed gallery has a one-tap Export picks button that downloads the original filenames one per line, which is the fastest path back into a catalogue when you are doing it twelve times.

Note what the numbers side does not give you. Analytics on this account are account-wide rather than per gallery, so you get totals across the studio for visits, photo views, picks sent, ZIP downloads and time spent, and not a separate report for the Tremblay family. The opened indicator on the tile is the per-gallery signal, and it is a yes or no rather than a report.

Three honest cases, because the worst outcome of a page like this is somebody buying a workflow they do not have a problem with.

Fixed deliverables, paid on the spot. If every family books the same package, gets the same fifteen edited frames and has already paid before they leave, there is no proofing round in your business. Nobody is choosing anything. A gallery is then a delivery mechanism and very little else, and you should judge it on whether the download is painless rather than on picking, favourites or sales features you will never open.

Delivering straight to a phone. A photographer who sends a link from their phone on the walk back to the car, to a client who opens it on the same phone, does not need most of a desktop publish workflow. The Lightroom Classic plugin is for people who cull in a catalogue. If that is not you, it saves you nothing.

Print sales are the business model. There is no print store here and no commission taken, because there is no store at all. A mini-session studio whose revenue comes from selling prints and albums after the session needs a platform with a store attached, and should not move to a flat-price delivery tool to save a few dollars a month on hosting. That is a real reason to stay where you are.

And the general caveat, repeated because it matters more on a repeated workflow than anywhere else: nothing here names your galleries, chooses your passwords or writes your emails. Twelve deliveries still involve twelve small decisions. What changes is that the export, the upload and the per-gallery fee stop being three of them.

The wider workflow this fits into is covered in the complete guide to delivering photos to clients.

This page states no competitor figure. Every number on it is a clientgallery.io plan or fair-use figure, checked against the running product on 12 September 2026: the plan at 10 $/month or 100 $/year with no per-gallery fee and no cap on the number of galleries, the ceiling of 1,000 photos per gallery, the 250 GB proof pool on a paid account at roughly 0.6 MB per proof JPEG, and the full-resolution ZIP that is live 3 days per handoff and re-uploadable any time. The day-shape table is arithmetic from those figures rather than a measurement of any account.