Photo Delivery Email Template for Clients: Five to Paste

Two things happen when a delivery email explains the gallery. The first is length: the link ends up buried under instructions for a screen the client has not opened yet. The second is drift. You write the download steps once, the gallery changes, and a year later you are still sending a paragraph that describes a button by the wrong name.

Write the email for the thirty seconds before the click, not for the ten minutes after it. That means three things and nothing else. What this is. What the client should do. The link. Add a date only when a real date exists, and add an availability line only when something genuinely goes away.

One test before you send. Read the email on a phone with the images off. If the link is not visible without scrolling, cut a paragraph.

A delivery email makes promises on behalf of your gallery, so the promises have to match what the gallery does. On clientgallery.io the four that come up in every template are these.

The one that trips people up is the second row. The gallery does not expire, but the full-resolution ZIP is a handoff rather than storage: it stays live for three days from the moment you upload it, and uploading it again restarts the clock. So never write that the finished files are available forever. Write that the gallery stays up and that the full-resolution files are a three-day window you will happily reopen. That sentence is true, it is short, and it gets people to download this week.

Subject: Your proofs are ready, 312 photos

Why it is shaped this way. This email is not the selection brief. It is the doorway. The number of photos sets expectations about the size of the job, one sentence names the action, and one sentence removes the objection that the client is about to be asked to create yet another account. Anything longer competes with the gallery, which already shows the client how to star and where the send button is.

If your package covers a fixed number of edits or your picks have a deadline, add that as one line above the link. The follow-ups for a gallery that goes quiet are a different job with different templates, and they live in the selection reminder guide.

Subject: Your finished photos are ready

Why it is shaped this way. This is the one delivery email that earns a fourth sentence, because it is the only one where something expires. Naming the actual weekday beats naming a duration: a client who reads "three days" on a Monday still has to work out what that means, and half of them will not. The last clause is the important one. Silent expiry with no way back is the failure clients remember, and offering the re-upload before they need it costs you a sentence and saves you an apologetic exchange in November.

Subject: Getting the photos onto your computer

Why it is shaped this way. This email exists because the client already told you what is wrong, so it answers one question instead of covering every device. Notice that it separates the two paths by machine rather than by button name. A client who cannot find a control is not helped by a more precise description of the control, they are helped by being told which device to be sitting at. Send this only when asked. Putting it in every delivery email is how delivery emails get long.

Subject: Northline campaign, final files and usage

Why it is shaped this way. A commercial delivery email gets forwarded internally, so it has to survive being read by somebody who was not on the shoot. The usage line is in the email rather than in the gallery on purpose. The gallery holds photos, not contract terms, and the person who eventually puts your image on a billboard is reading a forwarded email, not your estimate. Restating the licence in one sentence, with the date of the document it comes from, is the cheapest protection you will ever write. Ask the team to pull the files down rather than treating your gallery as their asset library, because that is a job for their storage and not yours.

Subject: Your gallery, link below

Why it is shaped this way. No lecture, no fee, no sigh. The whole email is a favour delivered in four lines, and the one piece of advice at the end is the only thing that stops it happening a third time. This template only works if the gallery is genuinely still there, which is the case on clientgallery.io because galleries are hosted for as long as the account exists. Do not paste it as-is on a platform where you have deleted the gallery to stay under a storage cap.

Clients use "full resolution" to mean the files they can print, and they say it because someone once handed them images that fell apart at 8 by 10. There are two different things in a gallery and the delivery email should be clear about which one is which.

• The photos on the page. These are proofs. They are compressed before upload so the gallery loads quickly on a phone, which is what makes browsing and sharing pleasant. They are the right size for a screen and the wrong size for a print you would frame.
• The full-resolution download. This is the ZIP you upload for that gallery, at whatever size you exported. It is the deliverable. It stays live for three days per handoff and you can replace it or put it back up whenever the client asks.

One sentence in the delivery email settles it: the photos you see on the page are for browsing, the button at the top gives you the print files. If you deliver proof-quality images on purpose for a proofing round, say that too. A client who downloads a proof believing it is a master finds out at the print shop, and that conversation is worse than any email you could have sent.

The whole-gallery download can also be switched off per gallery. Turning it off refuses the whole-gallery ZIP on the server and hides the per-photo download button, so treat it as a workflow setting for a proofing round rather than as a lock on every individual proof. If you send a gallery with downloads off, say so in the email. Clients hunting for a button that is not there assume the site is broken.

These are starting points, and that is a real limitation rather than modesty. A studio with an established voice should rewrite every one of them. Your clients hired you partly because of how you write to them, and the fastest way to sound like a subscription service is to paste a stranger's sentences into your own delivery. Keep the structure, which is the part that was engineered, and throw out the wording, which was not written for your market.

Two more honest notes. These are emails you send yourself from your own inbox, and clientgallery.io does not send them for you or schedule them. And if your delivery problem is that clients do not download, no template fixes it. That is usually a three-day window that opened while the client was away, and the answer is to put the files back up rather than to rewrite the subject line.

This page cites no external source. Every product figure and behaviour in it was verified in the clientgallery.io application source on 7 September 2026: galleries and their proofs are hosted for as long as the account exists, the full-resolution ZIP is uploaded per gallery and stays live for three days per handoff and can be re-uploaded at any time, the whole-gallery download can be switched on or off per gallery with the refusal enforced on the server for the whole-gallery ZIP, photos are compressed into proof JPEGs before upload, a gallery can carry a password, and a client needs no account because access is the share link itself.

• clientgallery.io, product source review, 7 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/