CuratePics vs PicDrop

PicDrop and CuratePics are built on the same conviction: that photographers are better served by a focused, EU-native delivery tool than by an all-in-one suite with a website builder and a print store bolted on. If you are weighing the two, you have already decided the important thing.

What follows is written after spending time inside a real, paying PicDrop account rather than reading their marketing page.

Where PicDrop is strong

It is a mature product, and the depth shows. Watermarking with honest guidance about its limits. File versioning, with a tool that reports how much storage older versions are costing you. Sub-galleries that inherit their parent’s settings. Saved sharing templates. Proofing flags you can rename to your own vocabulary. Separate collaboration and presentation modes for the same gallery. Team members on higher plans. A Data Processing Agreement you can read and sign inside the product.

That is years of accumulated work, and a photographer who has built a routine around any of it has a real reason to stay.

Where PicDrop is the better choice

Plainly: if you need watermarking, file versioning, sub-galleries, team seats, or a signable DPA today, PicDrop has them and CuratePics does not. No comparison table changes that, and you should not switch tools and hope.

Where CuratePics is different

Cheaper at 1 TB and above — but not everywhere, so check where you land. Both give 500 GB for about £15 a month. Between 500 GB and 750 GB PicDrop is the cheaper option, because you can add 250 GB to Pro for €7.99 a month instead of changing tier; we have no equivalent add-on. At 1 TB the position reverses clearly — CuratePics Pro CuratePics has one paid plan at £15 for 500 GB with nothing gated above it; PicDrop’s entry Pro is £15.99 +VAT for the same storage but keeps going up the ladder where we do not yet.

The largest gap is at the bottom: our free plan is 25 GB, theirs is 1 GB. Ours holds about five real galleries; a single wedding will not fit in theirs. (All figures checked 13 August 2026 against their pricing page and a live account; check both sites for current pricing.)

A gallery list that tells you what needs you. Most delivery tools, including this one, give you rows of galleries sorted by date — every project looking identical whether it was delivered this morning or is still waiting on a client who has not opened it in three weeks. CuratePics surfaces that state on the list itself, so the question “what actually needs me today?” is answered by looking rather than by clicking through.

Your own address without a web server. CuratePics gives your studio a subdomain from Settings — one setting, no hosting involved. PicDrop’s Web Forwarder achieves something similar by having you upload a bundle to your own web space, which their documentation notes requires an Apache server with PHP and will not work on hosts like Squarespace or Wix.

A delivered gallery is never removed by an automated job. Not a policy we can quietly revise — it is written into our terms and enforced in the database, because storage limits blocking new uploads is reasonable and storage limits deleting work a client already has a link to is not.

Switching from PicDrop

The honest obstacle is not features, it is that you may have dozens of galleries with live links your clients still use, and nobody wants to move those by hand.

So we will do it for you. Email info@curatepics.app and we will migrate your existing galleries ourselves while you carry on working. That offer is genuine and it is finite — it is only possible while we are small enough to mean it.

EU data residency is not a reason to choose between us. Both have it. Choose on price, on whether the feature depth matters to you, and on whether a gallery list that knows its own state would change your week.