How do photographers collect photos from second shooters?

Three ways, in the order most studios try them: cards handed over in person, a shared drive or transfer link, and an upload link straight into the delivery platform. Each one trades speed against how much of the work lands back on the lead photographer.

Cards in person

The second shooter hands over the cards, or a drive with the day's files, and the lead ingests them alongside their own. Nothing is lost in transit and nothing is compressed. It is also the slowest path, it only works when you are in the same place, and every file passes through one person's hands before a client sees anything. For a wedding with one second shooter it is often fine. For a league with six photographers across four fields it is a bottleneck with a name.

A shared drive or transfer link

Dropbox, Google Drive, WeTransfer and their peers. Fast to set up, and everyone already knows how they work. The cost arrives later: duplicate uploads, a folder called "Saturday" next to a folder called "sat", frames with no way of knowing which game they belong to, and then somebody moving all of it into the gallery by hand. A shared drive stores files. It does not know what a game is.

An upload link into the gallery platform

The shooter opens a link, picks where the frames go, and uploads. The frames arrive already sorted and already inside the thing the client will look at. It is the fastest of the three, and it is the only one that changes your risk profile, because an open upload link lets anyone holding it put files on your account.

That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a list of what the link has to do:

• Spend a budget, not your whole plan. A per-link cap on bytes and file count, and a clear statement of whose storage it is.
• Hold a new shooter's first batch for review. You should see what somebody sends before your client does, once. After that their uploads can publish on arrival.
• Screen what arrives. A link that might be forwarded needs the same content check your own uploads get, and it needs to fail shut when the check has not run.
• Let the shooter choose the destination, not build it. They pick the game. They do not create, rename or delete anything.
• Expire, and be revocable. A season ends; the link should too.

When the simple option is right

If you shoot alone, none of this matters. If your second shooter is one trusted person on one wedding, a card handoff is fine and adds no process. Upload links earn their keep when there are several shooters, recurring events, or a client who wants the gallery live while the event is still going.

How Encore does it

Encore calls these collect links. A link points at a season or a week you have already built; the shooter picks the game and uploads into it. Each link carries a 50 GB and 5,000-file budget against the studio's own storage, can take a password and an expiry, and can be revoked. A new shooter's first batch waits in a review queue; approving it marks that shooter approved, so their next upload publishes on arrival. Frames the screening pass flags, or has not yet screened, wait for a person regardless.

Collect links are on the Professional and Studio Plus plans, because the screening pass runs on those plans and an unscreened open link is not something Encore will hand out.