Gallery

A gallery is how your client sees their photos — to choose favourites, to leave notes, and to download the ones they want. Each gallery belongs to a project and has its own link.

Creating a Gallery

Open a project and click Create Gallery. Give it a title and, if you like, a description. It starts as a Draft — only your team can see it.

Gallery Settings

Open Gallery Settings from the gallery page.

The watermark image itself comes from Settings → Studio setup → Studio profile → Branding. Turning the watermark on generates watermarked versions of every photo in the gallery, which takes a moment — a progress bar on the gallery page shows how many photos are done, so a large gallery isn't a silent wait.

How the gallery looks — cover, fonts, colours, grid — is a separate screen. See The Gallery Designer.

Uploading Photos

Drop files onto the drop zone at the top of the gallery, or click Choose files. The zone grows and says Release to upload while you're dragging over it.

Supported: JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, most camera RAW formats (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, DNG and more), and MP4 / MOV video. SVG is never accepted.

Photos go straight from your browser to secure cloud storage — they never pass through the StudioFlow server — and are delivered to clients from a worldwide content network, so a gallery opens fast wherever the client is.

Maximum 5 GB per file. Anything larger is refused before the upload starts, with a message naming the files that were skipped; everything else in the same drop still uploads.

Uploading at scale

Wedding and event shoots routinely produce thousands of photos. StudioFlow is built to handle that:

• Large batches don't freeze the UI. Drop a folder with 1500–3000+ photos and the queue grows live in the upload drawer — no browser freeze, no hang.
• Four uploads run in parallel to keep throughput high without overwhelming the backend.
• An upload can run for hours. There is no time limit on a batch. On a slow connection a full wedding album may take most of a day, and that is fine — StudioFlow quietly renews each file's upload authorization in the background for as long as the batch needs.
• Short interruptions recover themselves. A dropped wifi connection, a phone switching cells, a laptop waking from sleep — each file retries on its own for about a minute before giving up.
• Failed uploads can be retried in bulk. If a few photos still fail, use Retry all failed in the upload drawer.

Chrome handles very large batches reliably. Safari can be flaky on multi-thousand-photo batches — use Chrome for the biggest deliveries.

Photo management

• Drag to reorder — use the move handle (the grip icon) to drag photos into the desired order. On mobile, press and hold the handle to start dragging.
• Move to position… — for a far move a drag can't reach, open Move to position… on a photo (or on a selection) and choose To the start, To the end, or To position… and a spot number.
• Sort photos… — reorders the whole gallery (or the open set) at once: by capture time, filename or upload time, oldest or newest first. StudioFlow shows how many photos will move and warns if any have no capture time before you confirm — this replaces the current order, and your client sees the new one.
• Edit Focal Point — click Focal on a photo to set its crop point for consistent cropping across thumbnails.
• Select all — selects every photo matching the current view (the whole gallery or an open set), not just the ones that have scrolled into view, so a 10,000-photo gallery selects in one click.
• Delete — remove individual photos, or Delete Selected for a selection, from the gallery.

Downloading a gallery yourself

Download on the gallery page (or Download selected for a selection) opens a dialog: choose the whole gallery or a set, and Full size or Web size. Then the browser saves the gallery. The browser's own downloads show the progress (and let you pause and resume), and StudioFlow says so once. A gallery of up to 9,000 photos is a single ZIP and one click, in every browser and on a phone. A bigger one is saved as a few files: in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers one click starts them all (if the browser asks whether to allow multiple downloads, choose “Allow” — it asks once per site); in Safari, Firefox and on an iPhone or iPad the dialog says “Your browser saves this gallery as N files.” and shows every file open, one button each — click each one. Under the button, a collapsed list of the files shows every one with its size; each is its own link, so a file that failed (or one you only need again) can be downloaded alone. The dialog also reminds you to have enough free space for the size shown before you start. Any photo still being processed is left out and noted, with a nudge to download again later once it's ready.

Publishing

Click Publish and the gallery becomes visible at its link; the badge changes from Draft to Published. Copy Link gives you the link to share, and Send to Client emails it for you — after a confirmation that names who it goes to, so a wrong project never mails the wrong person. Unpublish takes it back out of sight.

Once the client has chosen their favourites, Mark as delivered closes the loop and moves the project along.

Selecting and renaming galleries

On the Galleries list page, hover any gallery card to reveal a faint checkbox in the top-left corner of the cover image. Click the checkbox to select; click the thumbnail itself to open the gallery. Multiple selected galleries surface a toolbar above the grid showing how many are selected, with Select all (N) · Delete · Cancel.

To rename a gallery, click the 3-dot menu on its card and choose Rename. A small dialog opens with the current title pre-filled — edit, Save, done. On mobile and touch devices the selection checkbox is always faintly visible (no hover state to rely on).

Locking a gallery down

There are two different locks, and they do different jobs.

Gallery Password — who can look

Set a Gallery Password in Gallery Settings and a visitor has to type it before they see any photos at all. Until then they get the cover image and a prompt — no thumbnails, nothing else.

It's checked once per browser session, so a client types it once and then browses freely.

Download PINs — who can take a copy

Separate from the password, and separate from each other:

• Photo Download PIN — "Clients need this PIN to download photos. Videos are unaffected."
• Video Download PIN — "Clients need this PIN to download videos. Photos are unaffected."

So you can show a couple their whole wedding, let them download the photos freely, and hold the video back until the balance is paid. Each PIN has Copy, Regenerate and Remove next to it; + Set a download PIN adds one where there isn't one yet.

Your own team is never asked for a password or a PIN — those apply only to clients opening the public link.

The Gallery Designer

Design on the gallery page opens the Gallery Designer — a live preview with four tabs, and a Phone / Tablet / Desktop switch so you can see what the client will actually see.

Cover

Fourteen cover styles, each with a one-line description of what it does:

Type

Eight typography options, from Sans (a neutral font) through Serif, Classic, Modern, Timeless and Bold to Romantic (a flowing wedding script) and Flourish (elegant calligraphy). Plus a Title size — Small, Medium, Large or Extra large. Use a smaller size for a long title.

Color

Six presets — Default, Warm, Cool, Forest, Dark, Blush — or set the Text / Accent Color and Background Color yourself. Reset to default puts it back.

Grid

Grid Style — Mosaic (rows of mixed portrait and landscape, straight edges; the default for a new gallery), Masonry (columns, each photo at its own height) or Uniform grid (every photo cropped to 3:2) — plus Thumbnail Size (Regular or Large) and Grid Spacing.

Save Design when you're happy. If someone else has changed the design in the meantime, StudioFlow tells you rather than overwriting their work.

Gallery Templates

If you set the same gallery up the same way every time, save it as a template. Templates hold the look and the access settings — not photos, descriptions or which project a gallery belongs to.

Manage them at Galleries → Templates (Owners and Admins). From there you can create a template, edit one, rename it or delete it; when you create a gallery, pick a template to start from and override anything you like afterwards.

Client Interaction

Favorites

Clients can mark photos as favorites by clicking the heart icon. Favorites are tracked per client using an email-based identifier for cross-device consistency.

The first time a client uses favourites they're asked for their email address. That is what lets them carry on picking from their phone later and still see the same selection — StudioFlow recognises them, not their device.

Client Notes

Clients can leave notes on individual photos (e.g., "crop tighter", "use this for the album"). Notes appear as a blue chat badge on the photo thumbnail and are visible to studio staff in the gallery management view.

Viewing client activity

Click Activity on the gallery page to see visitor count, visits and downloads, and a recent-events list — "Opened the gallery", "Downloaded their favourites (12)". A visitor is only named if they created a favourites list; nothing else identifies them, and no IP addresses or device details are recorded. Activity is kept for 400 days.

Client notes on individual photos show inline, under the thumbnail, as you scroll the grid — there's no separate summary screen for them.

Who can open Galleries

Your own team is never asked for the gallery password or a download PIN. Those apply only to clients opening the public link.

Related

• Projects — a gallery always belongs to a project
• Clients — the client record a gallery's viewer is tied to
• Settings → Studio profile — the watermark, logo and branding a gallery uses
• Needs Attention — the reminders that fire when a gallery isn't delivered or selections aren't finished
• Settings → Documents — the studio-wide document theme a gallery's client emails share