How to Organize Multiple Shoots for One Client

A gallery on clientgallery.io can hold sections. Sections are the unit you use for shoots. The client record is the account, the gallery is the client, and each section inside it is one session, one campaign or one delivery round.

So a commercial client that books quarterly gets a single gallery called after the brand, living at your own subdomain, for example yourstudio.clientgallery.io/atelier-verdier. Inside it sit the shoots: the spring lookbook, the summer product day, the team headshots. That address is what goes in your email signature to them, in the invoice, in the shared document their marketing coordinator keeps. It does not change when you shoot again.

Sections are exactly one level deep. A gallery holds sections. A section does not hold sections. There is no folder inside a folder here, and no arbitrary depth. If a shoot is complex enough that you genuinely need to split it again, you cannot nest a second time. The answer in that case is a second gallery, not a deeper tree. We would rather tell you that plainly than let you design a structure the product will refuse to build.

One useful way to picture the limit: your top level is the client, your second level is the shoot, and that is the end of it. Anything you were going to put on a third level, such as raw versus retouched, or one deliverable per social channel, has to be either a naming convention inside a section or a gallery of its own.

This is the part people get wrong, and it is the part that decides whether the structure is worth anything in month eighteen. You name sections while the shoot is fresh in your head, so a name like "Day 2" feels obvious. To the client opening the gallery next February, it is a coin flip.

Three rules cover almost every case.

• Lead with the date, in a sortable form. Start with the year and month, then the subject. Sections stay legible even when there are fifteen of them, and the eye finds the recent ones without reading every word.
• Name the thing, not the job number. Your internal reference means nothing to the client. The section is for them.
• Say what stage it is. If the section holds proofs to choose from rather than finished work, put that in the name. Half the support emails a photographer gets are a client confusing a selection round with a delivery.

Keep the pattern identical across every client. The value of a convention is that you stop deciding. When all your sections read YYYY-MM Subject, stage, you can add one at eleven at night after a long shoot without thinking about it, and a year of work stays tidy by default.

There are two paths, and the second one is the fast one.

In the studio. Open the client's gallery, create a section, name it, and upload into it. This is what you use for a single new shoot on a gallery that already exists.

By dragging a folder in. Drop a folder onto the gallery and it becomes a section, one section per folder. If you already keep a season of work foldered on disk, which most photographers do, this is close to free. A folder called 2026-03 Spring lookbook, studio arrives as a section with that name and the photos inside it. Fix your folder naming on disk once and the gallery inherits it.

That is worth planning around if you are setting up a returning client for the first time. Rather than rebuilding a year of shoots by hand, name the folders on your drive the way you want the sections to read, then drag them in as a group. The structure you already keep for your own sanity becomes the structure the client sees.

Remember what is being uploaded. clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs. Photos are compressed in your browser into proof JPEGs sized for fast viewing, and they stay hosted for as long as your account exists. It is not a warehouse for RAW files or master video, and that is deliberate. It is the reason the price is flat.

Each section has its own link, and it is tempting to treat it as a small gallery. It is not. A section link is view-only. This matters most at exactly the moment you are least likely to check, which is when you are sending the delivery email, so here it is in full.

The rule that follows is short. Send the section link when you want to point someone at one shoot and nothing else, for example a colleague who only needs to see the product day. Send the parent gallery link whenever the client has to do something: choose, comment, or download.

On the delivery side, the full-resolution handoff is a paid feature and it works per gallery. You upload a full-resolution ZIP, it stays live for three days per handoff, and you can re-upload it any time the client needs it again. The hosted gallery itself never expires. Keep those two facts separate in your own head, because clients conflate them constantly: the page stays, the heavy download is a window.

Gallery passwords are per gallery, opt-in, and off by default. Because a section link resolves to its parent, a single password covers every section underneath it. You set it once on the client's gallery and every shoot you add later is behind it automatically. There is no per-section password to maintain and no risk of a new section going up unprotected because you forgot a step.

On the server, the password gates the gallery page, the whole-gallery download, the full-resolution ZIP, comments, and face search. Be accurate about what it is not: individual proof image URLs are public and do not expire. The password stops the gallery page from disclosing those URLs, but it does not protect an image URL that somebody already holds. For a corporate client with an embargoed campaign, that distinction is worth understanding before you promise anything in writing.

If you publish from Lightroom Classic, the plugin can set the password from the Export dialog, so a new client gallery can go live already password-set rather than being locked down afterwards.

One gallery per client is the default, not a law. Three things push you to split.

• The photo ceiling. Fair use is 1,000 photos per gallery. When you hit it, the upload refuses and tells you to split into another gallery. Galleries are unlimited, so this is a nudge rather than a wall. A client shooting four times a year at 200 proofs a shoot will reach it somewhere in year two.
• The account ceiling. A paid account holds 250 GB of proofs across everything, and standing full-resolution ZIPs are counted separately at 100 GB. A free account holds 5 GB and one gallery, which is enough to try the structure with a single client and not enough to run a studio on.
• The page simply gets long. This is the honest one. A gallery that accumulates sections forever eventually becomes a page the client has to scroll through to reach the shoot they want. There is no third level to hide the old work in.

So for a client with many shoots a year, split deliberately before the product forces you to. Two patterns work. Split by year, so the client has Atelier Verdier 2026 and Atelier Verdier 2027, each holding that year's shoots as sections. Or split by campaign, when the work naturally clusters into large distinct projects with their own stakeholders. Either beats one gallery that never ends. The point of the structure is that the client finds a shoot quickly, and a gallery with thirty sections has quietly stopped doing that.

The studio dashboard has a client record with free-text notes, and galleries attach to it. That is where the context lives: who the contact is, what they usually order, what went wrong last time, what they said about the crop on the hero image.

Be clear about who sees this. The client record is your view, not theirs. There is no client login and no client-facing index of a client's galleries. Nothing anywhere shows a client a list of everything you have ever delivered to them. Access is by link, which is exactly why the one stable gallery address matters so much. The gallery link is the client's copy of the structure, and your client record is yours.

Your client-facing pages carry only your logo, colors and fonts. There is no platform badge and no link back to us, and gallery pages are set not to be indexed by search engines, so a section named after an unannounced campaign does not turn up in a search result.

Worth saying plainly, because it saves you from bending a gallery into a shape it does not fit. If what you actually need is contracts, invoicing, a booking calendar and a project pipeline per client, that is client-management software, not a gallery. A gallery organizes photos and gives the client a place to view, choose and download them. It does not track a deal, chase a payment or hold a signed agreement.

A studio running real account management should pair the two: the business system for the commercial relationship, one gallery per client for the work. Trying to run the first inside the second produces a gallery full of sections named after invoices, which serves nobody.