How Long to Keep Client Photo Galleries Online

The storage bill is smaller than you think

Start with a wedding, the heaviest common job. These are assumptions, not measurements of your catalog; replace them with yours.

• 600 delivered JPEGs at about 6 MB each: 600 × 6 MB = 3,600 MB, or 3.6 GB.
• 30 weddings a year: 30 × 3.6 GB = 108 GB of delivered files per year.
• Keep five years of galleries online: 5 × 108 GB = 540 GB.

Now price it. Storage vendors change their rates often and you should check current ones, so use a placeholder: suppose your host charges an illustrative $10 per terabyte per month. 540 GB is 0.54 TB, so 0.54 × $10 = $5.40 a month, or $64.80 a year. That figure is not a quote from any vendor; it is a way to see the shape of the problem. Even if your real rate is five times higher, you are looking at roughly $324 a year to keep five years of weddings reachable.

Compare that with one re-booking. A single past client who comes back for an anniversary album, a parent who wants the family portraits, or a publication asking for a frame can be worth more than a year of storage. The delivered gallery is the cheap part of your archive.

Delivered files are not your real storage problem

The files that fill drives are the originals. Using the same assumptions, a wedding shot as 3,000 RAW frames at 30 MB each is 3,000 × 30 MB = 90,000 MB, or 90 GB. Divide by the 3.6 GB delivered set and the originals are 25 times larger than what the client sees.

That split is the whole answer to the retention question. A client gallery is a small, finished, high-value set of files. Your RAW archive is a large, unfinished, rarely requested one. They need different policies, and mixing them is how photographers end up either hoarding terabytes on a fast host or deleting a gallery a client still needs. If your backup plan is vague, fix that first, because a live gallery is a convenience copy, not a backup.

What clients actually come back for

Clients rarely ask for a gallery in week two. They ask in predictable windows, and the windows differ by shoot type. These are patterns worth planning around, not statistics; check them against your own inbox.

• Weddings: album design months after the event, parents requesting prints around the holidays, and the couple wanting files again at their first anniversary.
• Commercial and e-commerce: a campaign relaunch, a new marketer who cannot find last season's selects, or a retailer asking for the unused alternates.
• Portraits and headshots: a new job, a renewed profile, a request for a different crop.
• Real estate: relisting a property, sometimes years later.

Notice that none of these requests is a surprise to the client; they are a surprise to a photographer who has deleted the gallery. A short window on the review and proofing stage is reasonable. A short window on the final delivered gallery is where you lose repeat work. Rounds still being decided belong on the live link; finished galleries belong somewhere you can restore in minutes.

A retention schedule by shoot type

Here is a starting schedule. It is a recommendation built on the cost arithmetic above, not an industry standard, and you should adjust it to your contract and your jurisdiction.

The last row is different on purpose. Galleries of children, where families only see their own photos, carry privacy obligations that should push you toward deleting sooner, not keeping everything forever. Whatever you choose, write it into the contract so the deletion is something you promised, not something you did. Our post on whether review links get indexed by Google covers what a link exposes while it stays live.

Run the numbers on your own archive

The wedding example is only useful if you replace its inputs. Spend fifteen minutes on this and you will know whether retention is a real cost for your business or a worry you can drop.

1. Count one typical delivery. Open your last three finished jobs and note the file count and folder size of each. Average them. That is your per-shoot figure in gigabytes.
2. Multiply by shoots per year. Use last year's real booking count, not the number you hope for.
3. Multiply by the years you intend to keep galleries live. If you pick five and the answer frightens you, try two live and three cold.
4. Apply your host's actual monthly rate per terabyte. Divide your total gigabytes by 1,000 to get terabytes first; it is the step most people skip.
5. Compare to one repeat booking. If a single returning client pays more than the yearly storage line, keeping galleries is a margin decision, not a cost one.

Worked through with the earlier figures: 540 GB ÷ 1,000 = 0.54 TB, and 0.54 TB × $10 × 12 months = $64.80. Notice how little the answer moves when you change the assumptions within reason. Doubling the file size or the shoot count doubles a very small number. What moves it sharply is keeping originals on the same tier as delivered files, which the 25-to-1 ratio above already warned about.

One more input matters and does not appear on any invoice: your own time. Hunting through folders for a gallery that was deleted, re-exporting from a catalog, and re-uploading it for a client who asked on a Friday afternoon is unbilled work. Our breakdown of the hidden cost of chasing clients for photo selects shows how to put hours on that kind of admin, and the same method applies to restores.

Live, cold and deleted are three different states

Most of the fear around retention comes from treating it as a switch between kept and gone. There is a middle state that costs a fraction as much and covers nearly every real request.

Cold storage trades speed for price: a restore may take minutes to hours and may have a retrieval fee, so check your provider's terms before committing a whole archive. The principle holds either way. Keep a small, verified copy of every delivered set somewhere you control, and treat the live gallery as the thing you can afford to retire. If you are weighing free hosting for this, what free proofing tools really cost is worth reading, since expiry rules on free tiers are often the real price.

Put the policy in writing before the shoot

A retention policy only protects you if the client has read it. Put three sentences in your contract or onboarding email:

1. How long the gallery stays online, as a date or a number of months from delivery.
2. What happens after: archived, restorable on request, and whether a restore fee applies.
3. When the files are deleted for good, and that the client should download their set before then.

Then send one reminder before the date, two weeks out is enough. That reminder does double duty: it is also the nudge that gets a client to download files they were going to ignore. Photographers who skip it tend to learn about the policy when a client emails in a panic.

Finally, test a restore once a year. An archive you have never restored from is a hope, not a backup. Pick a gallery at random, restore it, open it, and confirm the filenames and counts match what you delivered.