Disclosure first, because it changes how you should read everything below. I built clientgallery.io. This is a first-party piece, written by the person who made the product, not a review and not an independent comparison. Where I describe the field, I am describing structures and trade-offs that apply to every tool in it, including mine. Where I describe my own product, I say so plainly.
The reason to write it at all is that delivery is the least discussed part of a photography business and one of the most expensive. Shooting and editing get all the attention. Delivery gets a monthly line item nobody re-examines, a workflow assembled out of habit, and a bill that quietly grows every year because it is indexed to work you already finished and already got paid for.
What follows is what a client gallery has to do, how the pricing models in this category behave over time, why masters and delivered JPEGs are two different storage problems, what happens to your galleries when you want to leave, and where the handoff back into Lightroom is silently costing you an hour per job. If you read this and stay on the platform you are on, that is a reasonable outcome. Knowing why you are staying is worth something.
Strip away the marketing and a client photo gallery has five jobs. Most tools do three of them well.
Deliver files to a non-technical person. The client is not a photographer. They are opening the link on a phone, at night, probably with one hand. If they have to understand file formats, zip archives, or a download manager, the gallery has failed. One obvious button that gets the whole set, and one way to grab a single image, covers almost everything real clients ask for.
Online proofing that produces a usable list. Proofing means the client goes through the set and tells you which frames matter. The important word is usable. A gallery where the client hearts forty images and you then read those forty filenames off a screen and hunt for them in Lightroom has moved the work, not removed it. The proofing feature is only finished when the selection arrives back inside the tool you edit in.
Favourites and picks that survive disagreement. Two people often review the same gallery: a couple, a marketing manager and their director, a bride and her mother. Picks need to be attributable, or at least mergeable, or you get a list with no author and a conversation you have to referee.
Download control. Who can download, at what resolution, with or without a password, with or without a watermark. This is where photographers most often want a lever and most often find a switch that is either fully on or fully off.
A decision about expiry. Almost every platform in this category expires galleries by default, or archives them onto a paid shelf after some months. That is presented as tidiness. It is a storage cost decision. Hosting a set forever costs the vendor money forever, and expiry is the cheapest way to stop paying it. There is nothing dishonest about the trade, but you should recognise it for what it is, because the cost of that policy lands on you in the form of a client emailing three years later asking for the photos again.
Gallery software for photographers is priced in one of three ways. The differences look small on a pricing page and large after four years.
| Pricing shape | What you pay for | How it behaves over time |
|---|---|---|
| Per gallery or per transfer | Each delivery, or each send | Tracks your actual volume. Predictable if your volume is steady, punishing in a busy season |
| Storage tiers | Total gigabytes held on the platform | Rises as a function of accumulated past work, whether or not you shoot this month |
| Flat | The account | Flat, until the vendor changes it |
The storage-tier model is the one worth thinking hardest about, because it is the most common and it has a property that is easy to miss: the bill is driven by jobs that are already finished, already delivered, already invoiced and already spent. Year one you fit comfortably. Year four you are paying a higher tier every month to hold galleries from weddings whose couples have children now. The work is not generating revenue any more, but it is still generating a monthly cost, and the only lever you have is deletion.
Two more mechanics deserve a look before you sign anything. First, free tiers in this category frequently monetise through a commission on print or product sales made through the gallery, which is a real cost that never appears on the pricing page as a price. Second, annual prepayment is usually cheaper and usually non-refundable, so the discount is also a switching cost. Neither of those is a scandal. Both belong in the arithmetic.
My own answer to this is a flat plan, 10 dollars a month or 100 dollars a year, with unlimited galleries, unlimited photos and unlimited clients, and nothing expiring. That is a first-party claim about my own product, so weigh it accordingly. The reason it is possible is entirely boring and is covered in the next section.
The single most useful distinction in photo delivery is between the files the client receives and the files you keep.
Take a plausible example rather than a statistic. A wedding might deliver several hundred finished JPEGs. At normal export sizes that set is a few gigabytes. The material behind it, the RAW files, the layered PSDs, the TIFFs, the second shooter's cards, is routinely an order of magnitude larger. Same job. Two wildly different storage bills.
They also behave completely differently. Delivered JPEGs are read constantly: every time a client opens the link, every time they share it, every time a thumbnail loads. Masters are read almost never, sometimes once in a decade, sometimes never at all. In storage terms these are opposite workloads, and the industry has separate products for them. Storage designed to be read constantly costs meaningfully more per terabyte than cold storage designed to be written once and rarely touched. That is the actual physics of the bill.
When a delivery platform lets you push masters into the same bucket as the proofs, you are paying hot-storage prices for cold-storage data, and the storage tiers start climbing. That is not the platform being greedy. It is one product being asked to do two jobs with one price.
The structure I chose for clientgallery.io follows that split directly. Proofs sit on fast storage and are included in the flat plan. Masters are an optional archive add-on billed by the terabyte, sitting on cold storage, priced at 10 dollars per terabyte per month. If you never upload a master, you never see that line. If you do, you are paying roughly what the storage costs rather than a tier that also has to subsidise everyone else's archive.
This is the question almost nobody asks during the trial and everybody asks eventually. It has two halves, and the second one is worse.
The first half is your files. Can you get everything out, in bulk, in one operation, without opening a support ticket. Some platforms make this easy. Some make it technically possible and practically miserable, gallery by gallery, click by click.
The second half is your links. Every gallery you have ever delivered is a URL sitting in somebody else's inbox, somebody's bookmarks, somebody's wedding email thread. When you leave a platform, those links break. You cannot email every client you have ever had. So churn in this category is not a data-export problem, it is a broken-promise problem, and it is the reason photographers stay on tools they have stopped liking.
The honest questions to ask any vendor, mine included, before you commit:
My position on the first one is that photos stay downloadable, always, by me and by you. I built an importer specifically so that leaving another platform does not mean re-uploading a decade. I have not solved the broken-links problem and neither has anyone else, because nobody can. The best available mitigation is a delivery domain you control, which is the next section.
A delivery gallery is the last thing a client sees at the end of a project, and for corporate work it is frequently seen by people who never met you. It is a portfolio surface whether you treat it as one or not.
Most platforms put their own branding on that surface on lower tiers and sell removal as an upgrade. That is advertising you are paying to host, aimed at an audience you personally assembled. Reasonable people differ on how much it matters. For a solo photographer delivering to consumers, probably not much. For anyone delivering to a marketing department that is also evaluating you against two other studios, it matters more than the price difference between tiers.
The technical options, in ascending order of control:
On clientgallery.io every account gets its own subdomain, in the form yourname.clientgallery.io, with no platform branding on any plan, because I picked a name that disappears rather than one that demands to be seen. If full custom-domain control is a hard requirement for you, ask specifically, on any platform, whether it is available and at which tier, because this is one of the most commonly upsold features in the category.
Follow a normal job end to end and count the steps: cull, edit, export JPEGs, upload the export to the gallery tool, wait for the upload, send the link, wait for the client, read the client's favourites, find those same images again in your catalogue, edit the selects properly, export again, upload again.
Two of those steps are pure transcription. Uploading an export you just made, and manually re-locating the client's picks inside your own catalogue. Neither produces a photograph. Both take real time, and both are the kind of tedious that produces mistakes at eleven at night.
The fix is structural rather than clever: the gallery should publish out of the catalogue, and the picks should come back into it. Lightroom Classic has had a Publish Service mechanism for exactly this for years, and it is underused in this category. When it works properly, you publish a collection from inside Lightroom, and when the client marks their favourites the selection arrives back as flags or labels on the same images, in the same catalogue, ready to filter.
clientgallery.io ships a Lightroom Classic plugin that does this round trip. I built it first, before most of the rest of the product, because it was the part of my own week I most wanted back. If you use a different platform, check whether it has a real Publish Service rather than a plugin that only does one-way export, and check whether picks come back at all. That single capability changes the shape of the work more than any feature on a comparison chart.
Everything above collapses into one idea worth keeping.
Delivery is short, hot and high attention. It lasts days or weeks. The files are small, they are read constantly, they need to look good on a phone, they need to be shareable, and their job is finished when the client has what they paid for.
Archive is long, cold and low attention. It lasts years or decades. The files are large, they are read almost never, nobody but you will ever see them, and their job is to exist on the day you need to re-edit, re-license, or prove authorship.
When one subscription covers both, the price of the second quietly inflates the price of the first, and you end up paying delivery rates for archive volume, forever, on jobs that stopped earning years ago. Whether you solve that with two vendors, one vendor with two clearly separated prices, or a subscription plus a drive in a drawer is a legitimate business decision with more than one right answer. Making it deliberately is the part that matters.
One last thing on honesty about fit. clientgallery.io is a delivery tool with an archive add-on. It does not run a print lab, and it is not a full studio management system with contracts, invoicing and a booking calendar. If print sales are a meaningful share of your revenue, a print-store platform will serve you better and I would rather say that here than have you find out after migrating. If what you want is unbranded delivery, proofing and picks that return to Lightroom, and a bill that does not grow with your back catalogue, that is the specific problem I built for.
No. I built clientgallery.io, so treat every claim about it as first-party. The structural points about pricing models, storage, expiry and migration apply to the whole category, including my own product, and you can verify each of them against any vendor's own pricing page and terms.
Three things, in this order. How the bill behaves in year four rather than month one. Whether client picks come back into your editing catalogue or have to be transcribed by hand. And exactly what happens to your files and your live client links if you cancel. Feature lists are easy to match. Those three are where tools actually differ.
Because hosting a gallery forever is a cost the vendor carries forever. Expiry, archive shelves and storage tiers are all versions of the same answer to that cost. It is a legitimate business model, but it is worth naming, since the practical result is that old clients come back asking for files you no longer have online.
Usually not, and mixing them in is what pushes most photographers up storage tiers. Delivered JPEGs are read constantly and belong on fast storage. Masters are read almost never and belong on cold storage or your own drives. Keep them separate, whether that means two vendors or one vendor that prices them separately.
A flat 10 dollars a month, or 100 dollars a year, with unlimited galleries, unlimited photos and unlimited clients, your own subdomain, no platform branding, client proofing and picks, and a Lightroom Classic plugin. The optional master archive is billed by the terabyte at 10 dollars per terabyte per month, and you only see it if you use it.
There is an import path for migrating existing client-facing galleries rather than re-uploading years of work by hand. What no tool can fix is the links you already sent: those point at your old platform and will break when you leave. That is worth planning around whichever direction you move.
If any of this was useful on its own, that was the point. If you want to see how the delivery side works in practice, clientgallery.io is at https://clientgallery.io, and the pricing, the storage split and the Lightroom round trip are all described there in the same terms used here. No trial countdown, no call required. Read it, compare it against what you pay now, and decide with the arithmetic in front of you.
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