How long should you keep a client gallery online?
A delivered client gallery should stay online indefinitely, not expire after 30, 90 or 365 days. Clients come back — for reprints, albums, anniversaries, and simply to re-download files they lost — often years after the shoot. Expiry timers exist to save the platform’s storage bill, not to serve you or your client. The right answer is a platform where a delivered gallery is never auto-removed.
Why timers are the wrong default
Most gallery tools auto-expire delivered galleries to control storage costs. It’s convenient for them and a liability for you:
- A couple asks for a reprint at their first anniversary — and the gallery expired at month twelve.
- A client’s laptop dies; the files they “downloaded” are gone, and so is the gallery.
- You look unprofessional for something the platform decided, not you.
The worst version isn’t a timer at all — it’s a storage-policy purge that removes delivered galleries with little warning. That has genuinely happened to photographers, and it’s reputation-ending.
What “keep it online” should actually mean
- No auto-expiry on delivered work. A gallery you’ve shared stays live until you choose otherwise.
- Excluded from storage jobs. If a platform ever enforces a storage limit, it should block new uploads and warn you — never remove delivered galleries. Here’s how that guarantee works.
- Your data stays yours, in a jurisdiction you trust. EU data residency plus a real backup policy means the copy exists and stays available.
A sensible policy for your studio
Deliver galleries as permanent by default. If you want to archive very old, unopened galleries to tidy your dashboard, do it deliberately — with a heads-up to the client and a way to restore. The principle: the client, not a timer, decides when a delivered gallery is done.
What to ask a platform
“Do delivered galleries expire? Can any automated job remove a gallery I’ve already delivered? What happens when I hit a storage limit?” If the answer to the first two is anything but a clear “no”, plan for the day a client asks for a photo that’s no longer there.
On CuratePics, a delivered gallery is excluded from every automated purge by design — it stays until you say otherwise. See the guarantee →