How to Share Wedding Photos With Vendors

These are images of someone's wedding. The people in them have not met your florist's marketing calendar. Before a single vendor gallery goes out, the couple says yes.

Make the ask concrete rather than open. "Your vendors will ask me for photos. May I send each of them a small set of their own work?" is a question a couple can answer in one line. A vague "is it okay if I share some?" invites a vague answer you will have to re-ask later.

Ask three things at once, because you will need all three:

• Yes or no to vendor sharing at all. Some couples, for work or family reasons, want the wedding off the internet entirely. Find out now, not after the venue has posted.
• Anything specifically excluded. A guest who does not want to be photographed online, a getting-ready set, the ceremony. Note the exclusions in writing.
• Whether the couple wants to be tagged or named. That is their call, not the vendor's and not yours.

Keep the answer with the contract. When a vendor asks six months later, you read a record instead of guessing.

The biggest mistake is sending every vendor the same wide set. The florist does not want the first dance. The band does not want the bouquet. Given a wide set, a vendor picks badly and posts a frame where their own work is blurred background.

Curate per vendor. You already know whose work each photo is, because you were there when it was built. Ten well-chosen frames beat sixty.

Build these sets while the gallery is still fresh in your head. Doing it six months later, on request, is what turns an hour of work into a week of it.

Credit is the thing you are trading for. If it is assumed, it evaporates. If it is written, it mostly holds. Decide your terms once, keep them in a saved note, and paste them into every vendor handoff.

Your terms are an agreement you make with the vendor in writing. They answer a short list of questions, and every one of them has caused an argument somewhere:

• Where the credit goes. Caption, tag, both, every post or only the first slide of a carousel.
• What the credit says. Give the handle and the studio name spelled the way you want it, so nobody is guessing.
• Where the images may be used. Social posts, the vendor's own website, a printed portfolio, a paid advertisement, a third party such as a magazine. Those are different things and they are worth different amounts.
• What may not be changed. Cropping, filters, colour grading, logo overlays, and reposting a screenshot instead of the file you sent.
• How long it runs. Open-ended permission is permission you cannot revisit.
• What happens if it is ignored. Usually one polite message, then no more free images.

Keep it to a short paragraph in the email, not an attachment nobody opens, and put it above the link. A vendor who credits you properly posts your name to an audience of engaged couples all season.

Vendors ask for "the high res" by reflex, and usually what they need is a file that survives a social upload. Match the file to the use.

What sits in a gallery on clientgallery.io is a proof. Uploaded photos are browser-compressed proof JPEGs of about 0.6 MB each, sized for fast viewing on a phone. For a vendor posting to a feed that is the right order of magnitude, because social platforms re-encode everything they receive anyway.

A vendor's own website is a different request, and a printed portfolio or a magazine submission different again. Those need the real file, which is a separate handoff on your side. On clientgallery.io, full-resolution delivery is a paid feature: you upload a full-resolution ZIP for a gallery, it stays live for 3 days per handoff and can be re-uploaded any time, with 100 GB of standing ZIPs per account. Hosted galleries never expire, so the proofs stay put.

One rule saves most of the trouble: never send a file larger than the use the vendor described. A florist who asked for social images and comes back wanting a banner is a second conversation, often a paid one.

Free vendor images buy goodwill and referrals. They are not meant to furnish a company's marketing library for three years. Draw the line before you are asked to.

A reasonable split, which you set in your own written terms:

• Free, with credit: a curated set of that vendor's own work from that wedding, used on their social accounts and their own website portfolio.
• Paid: advertising, a website homepage or hero image, printed brochures and trade-show material, packaging, anything a third party will publish under the vendor's name, and any use where the credit is going to be dropped.
• Paid and negotiated separately: a venue or a national brand that wants a standing library from every wedding you shoot there. That is a supplier relationship, not a favour.

Say the paid part in the same email as the free part. "These are yours to post with credit. For the website homepage or paid ads, tell me the use and I will send a quote." Most vendors accept that at once, because they buy photography for advertising already.

One note on mechanics. On clientgallery.io the pay-to-download unlock is manual. You paste your own payment link and you can switch downloads off, and nothing in the product connects a payment to download permission. Treat the link as an invoice you send and the download switch as something you flip yourself once the money lands.

The worst version of vendor sharing is forwarding the couple's gallery link. Now the florist is browsing the getting-ready set and the couple's private delivery is circulating in a group chat you are not in.

On clientgallery.io, sub-galleries are a studio-side organising tool. You build sections inside a gallery, and the couple still sees one scrolling page with a jump-to bar at the top. Nothing about the client view changes.

What matters here is that a section also has its own standalone share link. That page shows one section only, and it is view-only: no ZIP, no picks, no full-resolution download, no face search, and no link back to the parent gallery. For vendor sharing that is a genuine fit rather than a workaround. Make a "Fleurs" section, send the florist that link, and the florist sees the florist's images and has no route to the couple's full gallery.

The rest of the setup helps too. Client-facing pages carry no platform branding and sit on your own subdomain, which is what a vendor screenshots along with the images. Galleries can carry a password. One plan at $10 a month or $100 a year covers it, so eight vendor sections cost no more than one, under fair use of 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account, or 5 GB free.

Be clear about the limits, because they shape how you work:

• A section link is view-only. A vendor who needs files to download needs a separate route from you, which is the full-resolution ZIP handoff or a file you send directly.
• There is no per-vendor permission system, no expiring link, and no per-image watermark. A section link works until you stop sharing it.
• There is no seat model: no multi-user accounts, no roles, and no per-vendor logins. A two-person studio shares one account.

None of that stops a vendor from saving a screenshot, and no product does. Your written terms do that work. The link structure makes it easy to send the right images and hard to send the wrong ones by accident.

Vendor sharing becomes a week-long job when it is reactive. It becomes an hour-long job when it is a step in your delivery, done once, in order.

• Keep a vendor list per wedding. Collect names, emails and social handles at booking. Five minutes from the planner saves an afternoon of chasing.
• Tag as you cull. Mark the florals, the venue wides, the cake and the dress while you are already going through the take.
• Build the sections in the same sitting as the delivery. One pass, one gallery, sections named for each vendor.
• Send after the couple has seen their gallery, never before. They should not first meet their own wedding photos in a vendor's feed.
• Use one saved email. Greeting, what the set is, the credit terms, the link, the paid-use line. Change the name and the link.
• Check back in two weeks. Note who posted and who credited you correctly. That list is your real referral map.

Run that sequence for a year and the vendors who send you work are obvious in the notes. So are the ones who crop your name off, and you can quietly stop sending to them.

Every product fact stated on this page about clientgallery.io was verified in the application code on 21 September 2026: the standalone view-only section share link and what it excludes, sub-galleries as a studio-side organising tool, gallery passwords, the absence of a seat model, the manual pay-to-download unlock, the plan price, the fair-use ceilings, the proof JPEG size, the paid full-resolution ZIP handoff and its limits, the absence of platform branding, and galleries that never expire.

No third-party figures, prices or policies are cited on this page. The curation counts, credit terms and workflow steps are editorial recommendations, not measured claims. Nothing here is legal advice: the credit and use terms described are agreements you make in writing with the couple and with each vendor.