The Wedding Photo Proofing Gallery: A Delivery Plan

Before you build anything, write down who is going to open the link. In a normal wedding it is five groups, and each one wants a different thing from the same set of photographs.

• The couple. They want everything, and they want the album picks decided. They are the only audience with authority over selections.
• Both sets of parents. They want the ceremony, the family formals and the speeches. They are usually the least confident with a browser.
• The wedding party and guests. They want the handful of frames they personally appear in, and they want them tonight.
• The vendors. The planner, the florist, the venue, the band and the caterer want images of their own work for their marketing.
• You. You want a clean list of album selections and a job you can close.

One flat wall of nine hundred thumbnails serves none of them. The structure below serves all five from a single link.

Publish a small gallery within two or three days of the wedding. Twenty to forty photographs, edited properly, covering the arc of the day in miniature. Send it to the couple with one sentence saying the full gallery follows on the date in your contract.

The sneak peek is not a courtesy. It is the thing that stops the couple asking where the photos are while you are still culling. They have something to post, the parents have something to look at, and the pressure comes off the six weeks of editing that follow. A studio that skips this step spends those six weeks answering messages.

Build it as its own gallery, not as a folder inside the eventual full gallery. It has a different job and a different lifespan of attention. Hosted galleries do not expire and there is no per-gallery fee on the plan, so a second gallery costs nothing but the two minutes it takes to publish it.

Say the delivery date in the same message. A sneak peek with no stated date for the rest simply moves the question from "when are the photos" to "when is the rest."

The full wedding gallery should be one link with folders inside it, not one endless scroll. Sub-galleries are folders inside a gallery, and a wedding is the case they exist for. The couple's mother should be able to reach the ceremony in one tap without scrolling past ninety frames of hair and makeup.

Six chapters cover almost every wedding.

Name the folders in plain words, not in your file-naming convention. Keep the order chronological, because that is the order a guest remembers the day in. If the couple had no first look, drop that folder rather than leaving it empty.

One structural warning worth stating in your delivery email: a guest who is inside a folder and thinks the gallery is small has simply not gone back up a level. That is the single most common "photos are missing" message a studio gets after switching to chapters.

A wedding is the shoot most likely to run into a platform's limits, so here are ours in plain figures rather than in a word like unlimited.

Run the arithmetic on a real wedding. Nine hundred proofs at roughly 0.6 MB is about 540 MB of hosted proofs. The 250 GB account allowance holds more than four hundred weddings at that size, and every one of them stays live for as long as the account does.

The number to plan around is the 1,000 photos per gallery. Most weddings land under it comfortably, and the usual advice on delivered counts, cull hard and send only frames you would be proud to have printed, keeps you there. When a wedding genuinely exceeds it, and a long multi-part celebration will, you publish a second gallery for the overflow, for example a separate one per day of a multi-day celebration. There is no per-gallery fee, so that costs nothing. Sub-galleries do not help with this particular problem: the 1,000 is counted per gallery, and a photo filed into a folder still belongs to the gallery holding it. Folders are navigation, not extra room. What you should not do is pretend the ceiling is not there and discover it mid-upload the night before delivery.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because it is what keeps the price flat: the gallery hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video. Your originals stay in your own backup.

Proofs are for choosing and for sharing. The full-resolution files are a separate handoff. You upload a full-resolution ZIP for the gallery, it stays live for three days per handoff, and you can re-upload it any time the couple asks. An account holds up to 100 GB of standing ZIPs at once.

That three-day window is deliberate and it should be in your delivery email. Write something like: the gallery itself stays online, and the full-resolution download is open for three days from today, so put the files on your own drive when you get them. A couple who reads that sentence downloads on day one. A couple who does not read it writes to you in March, and you re-upload the ZIP, which takes a minute.

Do not tell a client that full-resolution files are available forever, because that is not how this works and it is not how any handoff should work. The permanent thing is the gallery. The heavy files are a delivery event you can repeat on request.

Album selection is where wedding jobs go to die. The couple opens the gallery, writes down forty file numbers in a notes app, sends fifteen of them in one email and twenty-five in another three weeks later, and you retype the lot into your catalog. That is the three-month email thread, and it is entirely avoidable.

The pass that works has four parts.

• Give a number. "Your album holds about 60 photographs, so mark around 80 and we will edit down together" is a decision a person can make. "Let us know your favorites" is not.
• Give a window. Two weeks is enough for a couple who has just come back from a honeymoon. State it when you send the link, not after it lapses.
• Point them at the chapters. Tell them to work one folder at a time and finish it before moving on. Album paralysis is a scrolling problem before it is a taste problem.
• Take the picks back into the catalog, not into a spreadsheet. The two-way Lightroom Classic plugin publishes proofs from your catalog and pulls the client's picks back into it. The selection arrives as something you can filter and edit, so nobody retypes a filename and nobody loses a frame in an email thread.

Lock the list once you start designing. One reconciliation round is reasonable. An open list is how a two-week album becomes a two-month album.

The couple will share the link. Assume it, plan for it, and treat it as distribution rather than as a problem. Three things make that go well.

Face Search. A guest who wants the four frames they appear in should not have to scroll nine hundred. Face Search is included in the plan and lets a guest filter the gallery down to themselves, which is the difference between a guest who finds their photos and a guest who asks the couple to find them.

Your name on the page, and nobody else's. The gallery sits on your own subdomain with no platform branding on any client-facing page. When the bride's father opens the link, he sees your studio. He does not see the logo of a software company he has never heard of, and when he recommends you, he has your name to recommend.

It is still there at the anniversary. Hosted galleries do not expire. Couples come back on the first anniversary, and again when they want a print, and again when a parent wants a copy. A link that still works two years later is worth more referral traffic than most marketing a small studio does on purpose.

Every wedding has five to ten vendors who need photographs of their own work and will get them one way or another. If you do not plan the handoff, they screenshot the couple's social posts and credit nobody. If you do plan it, they post your work, tagged, to an audience of exactly the people who are planning a wedding.

Do it in three steps, once, and reuse it every wedding.

• Shoot the details chapter for them. The florals, the stationery, the tablescape, the cake, the room before anyone walks in, the venue exterior. Fifteen minutes of deliberate work that costs you nothing on the day.
• Publish a vendor gallery. A separate gallery, or a sub-gallery within the wedding, holding the images relevant to that vendor. There is no per-gallery fee, so a gallery per vendor is a reasonable choice for the planner and the venue, who want different frames.
• Send it with terms in writing. Two sentences: these are free to use on your website and social channels, with a credit to the studio and a link; they are not licensed for paid advertising without asking. Vendors respect that because it is clear, and because someone finally gave them usable files instead of a screenshot.

Get the couple's agreement before sending anything to vendors, in the contract or in one message. It is their wedding, and a private ceremony is a real reason to say no.

This is the cheapest marketing in wedding photography and the one most studios skip. A venue that reposts your ceremony frames is showing your work to every couple touring that venue for the next year.

Honest version, because it will save you a migration. If your wedding business runs on print and album sales through a lab, with a client relationship manager attached, stay with Pixieset or Pic-Time. That is what those products are built for, and they are good at it.

Pic-Time describes itself as a gallery and sales platform with a built-in print store and automated fulfillment through more than thirty lab partners worldwide. Pixieset's help centre states that its store sells print products and digital downloads directly from galleries, that orders in supported countries go to a lab partner for printing and shipping, and that store commission is 15% on the free plan and 0% on its paid Client Gallery and Suite plans.

clientgallery.io has no print store. There is nothing to sell prints through, and therefore no commission on anything, because there is no transaction between your client and us. For a studio that sells digital collections and books albums directly, that is the point. For a studio whose margin comes from print orders placed inside the gallery, it is a real loss, and no amount of flat pricing makes up for a revenue channel you no longer have. Choose accordingly.

Every competitor figure on this page was fetched from that company's own site on 9 September 2026. Pixieset help centre articles carry their own update dates, given below.

• Pic-Time home page (gallery and sales platform with an integrated print store, automated fulfillment with more than thirty lab partners worldwide), fetched 9 September 2026, https://www.pic-time.com/
• Pixieset, Introduction to Pixieset Store (selling print products and digital downloads directly from galleries, orders routed to lab partners for printing and shipping where automatic fulfillment is available), article updated 16 August 2026, fetched 9 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043195012
• Pixieset, How does the 0% commission fee work (15% on the Free plan, 0% on every paid Client Gallery and Suite plan), article updated 8 September 2026, fetched 9 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975072
• clientgallery.io plan and fair-use figures, verified in the product on 9 September 2026: $10 a month or $100 a year, proof JPEGs of about 0.6 MB, 1,000 photos per gallery, 250 GB of proofs per paid account, 5 GB on a free account, full-resolution ZIP live 3 days per handoff with 100 GB of standing ZIPs per account, https://clientgallery.io