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Delivering finished work to a client

A finished shoot has to get to the client without being published anywhere public. This page covers delivering a gallery to a client and what they see when they open the link you send them.

Delivery is an assembly job, not a publishing one

There is no “publish” step here, and that is the part worth adjusting to if you have delivered work through a portfolio site or a social platform before. A PhotoLog delivery is an album you build and a share you make for it. Nothing in it has an audience until you send the link.

Which means the editorial decision and the delivery decision are the same decision. The album you assemble is the delivery: put the selects in it, leave the outtakes out, and the choosing and the sending are one step rather than two. Creating and sharing a private album covers the mechanics of building one and making a share for it.

What the client sees

They open the link in an ordinary browser. There is no separate sign-in step and no account for them to create - the link itself is what grants access, so it works on whichever device they happen to open your email on.

What they get is the album’s photographs and videos. A share is made for one album, so what you put in that album is precisely what arrives, and the rest of your library is not part of what the link opens.

Choose view, and know why the other setting exists

You choose view, or view plus upload, when you create a share. For a hand-off, view is the setting: the client can look at the finished work and cannot add to it or change it.

View plus upload exists for the case where the flow runs the other way - a client sending you their own reference shots, or guests adding to a gallery you are hosting. Adding is the part that needs a signed-in PhotoLog account, which viewing does not. There is no upload-only share: every share PhotoLog can make includes view, so the two are not independent switches that could be combined into “add without seeing”. QR sharing - how it works sets out both levels in full.

Whoever holds the link can open it. The consequence that only shows up in paid work is this: a client who forwards your delivery to their sister has shared it with their sister, and nothing in PhotoLog tells you it happened. You will not be asked, and you will not find out.

Which is why the end date belongs in the same hour as the invoice. You know then what the client still has to do with the files and how long that takes; in four months you will know neither as clearly, and setting a date by then means an email rather than a setting. Creating and sharing a private album sets out what deactivating a share does and does not reach, for the day it comes to that.

The export is the delivery

PhotoLog gives the client the file you uploaded, so the quality of the hand-off was settled at export time rather than at delivery time - and the person who discovers it is the client, after you have already sent the link. Uploading and organizing your library covers what to export and why.

A delivered gallery is not an archive - for either of you

Two habits save the awkward email eighteen months later.

  • Keep your own second copy of the shoot, outside PhotoLog, for anything you are contractually on the hook for. Backing up your library and setting up storage explains why a second copy that fails for different reasons is the one worth having.
  • Tell the client the delivery is theirs to keep. If you set an end date on the share, say so in the same message as the link, and say it in the sentence that asks them to download rather than in a footer nobody reads.