How photographers deliver photos to clients

Most professional photographers deliver finished work through a client gallery: a private web page, branded to the studio, where the client views, favourites and downloads their photos. The alternatives are a file-transfer link, a cloud-storage folder, or physical media, and each one trades away something a gallery keeps.

The four methods

File transfer (WeTransfer, Dropbox Transfer). Fast to send, nothing to set up, and the link expires. That expiry is the problem: the client comes back in four months for a photo they need and the link is dead, so the request lands on you. There is also no record of what happened after you hit send.

Cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud). Durable and familiar, but a shared folder is a filing system, not a delivery. It shows filenames rather than photographs, it invites the client into a folder you also keep other things in, and it carries none of your branding.

A client gallery. A page you control: your name on it, the photographs presented as photographs, downloads you can turn on or off per size, and a link that does not rot. The cost is a subscription and a few minutes of setup per job.

Physical media. A USB in a nice box still has a place as a keepsake at the top end of the market. As the primary delivery it is slow, unbackuped, and impossible to re-send.

What actually decides it

The honest test is how often you get asked for the same photos twice. If you shoot a handful of jobs a year and your clients never come back, a transfer link is genuinely enough and a subscription is not obviously worth it.

If you shoot regularly, the recurring cost is not delivery - it is re-delivery. Every dead link is an interruption that arrives months later with no context, and the work of finding the files again is yours. A gallery that keeps working is mostly buying back that time.

The second thing it buys is what the client sees. A folder of filenames and a designed page containing the same photographs are not the same product, and the second one is the one people forward to their family.

What to look for

• Durable links. A gallery whose URL survives is worth more than one with a longer expiry.
• Download control per size. Web-sized files for sharing, full resolution when you mean to give it away.
• Your branding, not the platform's - including the domain, if you can get it.
• A record of what happened. Whether the client actually opened it is the difference between chasing and knowing.
• An export route. Whatever you choose, be able to leave with your files.

How Encore does it

Encore is a client gallery platform. Every frame carries a permanent Roll ID, galleries can be served from your own domain, and every view, favourite and download is written to a per-studio hash chain you can export - so "did they get it" is a lookup rather than an email.

It is a subscription product, and the paragraph above about shooting a handful of jobs a year applies to it as much as to anything else.