How to Send Photos to a Magazine or Publication

Requirements vary by title, and the only authority on a given desk is that desk. What follows is the common shape of the ask, and the part of it you control.

Note how much of that table is you rather than software. The caption list, the credit line and the edit are the whole professional part of this job. A delivery tool can only make sure the files arrive intact and that nobody is asked to sign up on the way in.

The link an editor gets here opens a gallery at your own subdomain, at yourname.clientgallery.io. The only header on that page is your logo or your name and there is no footer. There is no platform branding on a client-facing page, so nothing on the screen suggests the editor has arrived somewhere they need to join.

They do not. There is no client account at any point in the path. The editor opens the page, and can take the whole gallery in one click as a ZIP of every proof numbered in order, or take any single image on its own. That is the entire interaction.

If the story is sensitive, put a password on the gallery. The gate is enforced on the server and it covers the files, not only the page, so the whole-gallery ZIP and the full-resolution download sit behind it too. Send the password in the same message as the link. A desk will not chase you for it.

Keep the link at the top of your email, above the caption list, with the credit line beside it. Everything an editor needs to act should be visible without scrolling, and everything they need to read should be underneath it.

The proofs in the gallery are browser-compressed JPEGs. They exist so the page loads fast and so an editor can look through the set on a phone. They are not the file you are filing.

The file you are filing is the full-resolution ZIP, which you build and upload yourself for that gallery. It sits behind the same link. It is a paid-plan feature and the rules on it are worth knowing before you plan a deadline around them.

The three-day window is the thing to plan around. If you are filing on a Friday for a Tuesday close, say in your message that you will re-post the files on request, and then do it. That sentence costs you nothing and removes the only friction the window creates.

This is the part most delivery advice gets wrong, so here is the honest version.

Captions and credit written into a file's metadata are not guaranteed to survive a proof. The proofs shown in the gallery are browser-compressed JPEGs, and if you publish from the Lightroom Classic plugin, the renders it publishes have their location metadata stripped. Do not assume an editor looking at the gallery page is reading your caption fields, because there is no promise here that they are.

So the authoritative caption list travels in two places, both of which you control. It goes in the body of your message, plain text, one line per frame, keyed to the original filename. And it goes inside the full-resolution handoff as a text file alongside the images, so that when the ZIP is passed to a sub-editor who never saw your email, the captions go with it.

Write the list before you upload, not after. A caption list written while you are still looking at your own take is accurate. One written three hours later from memory is how a correction gets published with your name on it.

Keep the credit line at the top of the list, once, exactly as it should be set. If there is an embargo, put the date and time on the same line, and repeat it in the subject of the email.

A gallery can be organised into named sections in the studio, and you move photos between them. This is how you keep two sets apart in one filing: an embargoed section and a free-to-use section, each named so there is no possible ambiguity on a screen at speed.

Understand what the editor sees, because it is not what you see. They get one scrolling page with a jump-to bar at the top. They do not open anything or navigate into anything. Your section names are signposts on a single page, which is why the names have to carry the whole meaning on their own.

A section also has its own standalone share link. That page is view-only: no ZIP, no picks, no full-resolution download and no face search, and it does not link back to the parent gallery. It is useful when you want one desk to see one part of a shoot and nothing else. It is the wrong link to send when you want them to take files, because taking files is precisely what it does not do.

A link that asks the editor to register. This is the common one and it is fatal in a way you never find out about. The desk does not email you to say it declined to make an account. It simply runs someone else's picture. Any step that requires an identity, a verification email or an app install is a step you have added to someone else's deadline. Test your own link in a private browser window before you send it, and if anything at all asks you to identify yourself, that is what the editor will hit too.

A file that arrives too small to print. The second one is quieter. The image is used small, or it is used and looks soft, or it is rejected at the layout stage after everyone had agreed to run it. Sending a web proof when a desk asked for a full-resolution file is the single most common self-inflicted wound in editorial delivery. The proof and the master are two different objects here, and the ZIP is the one that carries the master.

Both failures share a root. They happen because the photographer optimised for their own convenience at upload time rather than for the editor's convenience at open time. The whole discipline of filing is remembering that you are the one with time to spare.

When a desk tells you which frames it is running, you want that in a form you can act on rather than a sentence in an email thread.

In a gallery, one tap on an image is a star and two taps is a love. Every completed gallery has a one-tap Export picks button that downloads the original filenames, one per line, as a text file. The file does not distinguish stars from loves, so if you need that distinction, agree on it in words instead.

That text file is how an editor's chosen frames come back to you as a list of filenames rather than a description. You match it against your own take, finish those frames properly, and send the finals. It also gives you an exact record of what was selected, which matters later when an invoice or a usage question comes up.

Not every desk will pick inside a gallery, and that is fine. Many will simply write you the filenames, which is why the filenames have to be in the ZIP and in the caption list in the first place.

Three cases, stated plainly, because sending the wrong thing to a picture desk is worse than sending nothing.

You are represented by an agency. Then you file through the agency's own system, with its own caption schema and its own numbering, and this page is not for you. Filing around your agency creates a rights mess and will not make you any friends at the desk either.

The publication requires delivery into its own ingest system. Larger titles and wire-adjacent desks often have an upload portal, an FTP endpoint or a specified transfer route, and a compliance reason for it. They will not accept a link from you no matter how clean it is. Use their route. Ask for it before the shoot rather than after.

They are asking for RAW. Uploads here accept JPG and PNG. There is no RAW and no video. clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs and does not warehouse master files, which is a large part of why the price is flat and stays flat. If a publication needs your RAW files, that transfer happens some other way.

What is left after those three exclusions is most working photographers most of the time: a freelancer with a set of frames, an editor with a deadline, and a need to move files between them without a platform inserting itself. If that is you, the workflow is the whole of this page and it fits in a paragraph. Edit down. Write the captions. Upload the proofs and the full-resolution ZIP. Send one link and the caption list. Re-post the ZIP if they come back.

For the wider delivery workflow this sits inside, see the photo delivery guide, the detail on sending full-resolution files, and the commercial gallery guide if your editorial work sits beside commissioned client work on the same account.

This page states no external figure and cites no third-party document, because nothing on it depends on one. Every product number above is a clientgallery.io plan or fair-use figure, checked in the running product on 12 September 2026: the flat plan at 10 $/month or 100 $/year with the first gallery free, 1,000 photos per gallery, a full-resolution ZIP that the studio uploads itself and that is live 3 days per handoff, re-uploadable at any time, with 100 GB of standing ZIPs per account, and no client account anywhere in the download path. What a given publication requires of a submission is set by that publication, changes without notice, and should be confirmed with the desk rather than with this page.