How to Deliver Photos to Clients (Not a Dropbox Link and a Prayer)

The short answer: deliver through one link to an online gallery, where the client can browse the photos first and download them second, in both full resolution and a web-friendly size, without creating an account for anything. Nearly every good delivery is a variation on that sentence. The tools split into four camps: dedicated client gallery platforms, general cloud drives, one-off transfer services, and a gallery page you run yourself. Which camp fits depends on whether you deliver twice a year or twice a week, and whether the gallery also needs to sell prints or just hand over files.

What doesn't work, and keeps getting used anyway: emailing exports (mail servers cap attachments around 25MB and often recompress what gets through), a transfer link that expires before the couple is back from the honeymoon, or a shared folder that greets the client's phone with a signup prompt. Every one of those produces a support conversation later. A good delivery produces none.

• Export two sizes. Full-resolution JPEG at high quality for printing, plus a roughly 2048px web version for phones and social. Clients share the small copies and print the big ones; hand over only one size and the wrong one gets used for both.
• Name files so they sort. Something like Rivera-2026-0418-014.jpg beats DSC_4831.jpg. Your client will be searching for these files years from now, on a laptop you'll never see.
• Upload to a gallery, not a folder. People decide how they feel about the photos while scrolling them. A grid of thumbnails creates that moment; a file listing kills it.
• Watermark anything that isn't paid for yet. If the final invoice is open, deliver watermarked previews and release clean files on payment. This is painful to retrofit by hand and painless when it happens automatically at upload.
• Send one link with one line of instructions. A sentence about how to download on a phone prevents most of the follow-up email you'd otherwise get.
• State the retention window up front. Tell the client how long the gallery stays live (six to twelve months is a common promise) and that long-term archiving is their job or a paid add-on. Silence on this point turns into an upset email in year three.

Client gallery platforms

Pixieset, Pic-Time, and ShootProof were built for exactly this job, and it shows: client-facing galleries with proofing, favorites, download PINs, and print sales wired to a lab. If selling prints and albums through the gallery is real revenue for you, this category earns its subscription and you should be in it. The tradeoffs are a recurring cost that climbs with stored gigabytes, and free plans small enough that a single wedding fills them.

Cloud drives

Google Drive gives you 15GB free and Dropbox 2GB, and both will share a folder link in seconds, which is why so many photographers start here. As a client-facing system they're clumsy: the browsing experience is a file manager, your branding appears nowhere, non-Google clients get prompted about accounts, and that free space is shared with your own email and backups. If you've already felt those walls, the same complaints drive our rundown of the best Dropbox alternatives.

Transfer services

WeTransfer and its cousins move a big file from A to B with zero setup, a genuinely great trick for a one-time send. As a delivery method they have one flaw that outweighs the convenience: expiry. Free WeTransfer links stop working after three days, whether or not the client ever downloaded the files, and if the client can't re-download in month two, you're the one re-sending everything. The full picture, including which senders don't expire on you, is in our guide to WeTransfer alternatives.

A gallery page you run yourself

The fourth route is hosting the delivery on something you control: a gallery at a link you own, with your name on it, where files stay until you decide otherwise. That used to mean a web server and some scripting, which is why most photographers never did it. Hosted upload platforms have closed that gap, and this is where Tonta comes in.

A photo delivery has one hard requirement: it still works when the client comes back for the files in month eleven.

The processing happens on the way in. Per-uploader quality settings control compression, and web-sized WebP versions are generated next to the main file, so the gallery grid loads fast on a phone without touching the copy the client will print. If you shoot video too, transcoding to multiple resolutions with streaming delivery is included from the Professional tier up.

Delivery is also only half of the client file problem. The same drop-page mechanics work in reverse, pulling raws, selects, and paperwork off a client without email attachments, which we've covered separately in how to collect files from clients. One platform ends up holding both directions of the exchange.

The honest limit: Tonta isn't a proofing suite. There's no favorites flow, no print store, no lab integration. If your business sells prints off the gallery, Pixieset or ShootProof earns its fee and you should pay it. Tonta's case is the photographer whose deliverable is the files themselves: you want them on a page you own, behind your own name, priced as a flat storage tier instead of a per-feature ladder.

The free tier is a real one, no card required, but respect the single-uploader limit: it's enough to run one live delivery gallery and test whether the workflow suits you, not enough to run a client roster. The jump that matters for photographers is Starter, because that's where watermarks and branding removal live, and 100GB comfortably holds ten or more full wedding deliveries at once. Clear galleries as their promised retention window ends and the space recycles itself.