How long should you keep a client gallery online?

The common practice is 30 to 90 days of active access, then archive, with the files themselves kept far longer. The active window exists to create urgency and to bound storage cost; the archive exists because clients come back years later and because you may need the work again yourself.

Why the short window is conventional

Two reasons, and only one of them is about the client.

The honest one is cost. Galleries are mostly storage, and storage you never delete grows without limit. An expiry date is the simplest way to stop paying for every job you have ever shot.

The other is urgency: a deadline makes people download. That works, and it is also where the practice turns against you. A client who missed the window writes to you, months later, with no context, and now the work of finding and restoring their gallery is yours. The expiry did not remove that work; it moved it to a worse moment and attached your name to the inconvenience.

A more useful shape

Separate the two things the deadline is doing.

• Keep the download window short if urgency helps you - it genuinely does for consumer work where people procrastinate.
• Keep the gallery reachable afterwards, even in a reduced form. A page that still loads and says how to request the files is worth far more than a dead link, because it answers the client's question without involving you.
• Keep the originals for as long as your contract says, and say so in the contract. Most photographers underpromise here and then quietly keep everything, which is the worst of both: no credit for the service and all of the cost.

What to decide before the first delivery

• How long can the client download? Put it in writing and in the gallery.
• How long do you keep the files? Different number, usually much larger.
• What happens at the boundary - deleted, or archived and restorable on request?
• Who pays for a restore? A small fee is reasonable and makes the archive sustainable. Free is also fine, if you have decided it rather than drifted into it.

How Encore does it

Galleries can be published, expired or filed away without deleting anything: archiving removes the derived web-sized copies and keeps the originals, so the storage drops but the work is recoverable. A gallery that has been filed goes dark to the client rather than 404ing into nothing.

Storage is the metered resource on every plan, which is the honest version of why a retention policy matters - it is your bill, so it should be your decision rather than a default.