Mobile Photo Approval: Clients Who Only Use Phones

What changes when the reviewer is on a phone

Three things differ, and each one has a number you can work out yourself.

The picture is small. Fit a landscape frame to a 390-point-wide portrait screen and it is 390 points wide. A 3:2 frame is therefore 390 × 260 points; a 2:3 portrait frame is 390 × 585. Retouching detail is not judgeable at that size, but composition, expression, colour mood and "is this the right moment" are. Ask phone reviewers for those decisions and save pixel-level checking for a later round.

The input is a fingertip. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines recommend touch targets of at least 44 × 44 points, and Google’s Material Design guidance uses 48 × 48 density-independent pixels. Anything smaller than that, such as a tiny heart icon or a pin you must drop precisely, will be missed or mis-tapped.

The attention is borrowed. The client is waiting for coffee, not blocking out an afternoon. A round that needs twenty minutes of focus gets postponed until a desk is available, and the postponement is what you experience as "the client is slow".

The link must open without a login

The fastest way to lose a phone reviewer is a screen that says "create an account". Password managers are awkward on a phone, verification emails land in another app, and a client who was one tap from replying is now doing admin. Every step between the email and the first photograph costs you a share of the clients who started.

So the first test of any tool is simple: open the link in a private browser tab on your phone, signed out of everything. If you see anything other than a photograph, the process fails the phone client. Appruva’s share links work this way: the client gets an anonymous session on the shared object only, with no account, which is why it suits the person who will only ever see your work once.

Two smaller points belong here. Do not send a link that expands into a download prompt for a zip, because phones handle large archives badly and clients rarely have the storage to spare. And do not rely on an attachment: the size cap on many mail apps and the compression applied to pictures sent by text message are the reasons we wrote about text message photo approvals as quietly expensive.

Ask for decisions a thumb can give

A phone reviewer can comfortably do four things: swipe through frames, tap to pick or reject, tap a spot on the image, and type one short line. Design your request around exactly those.

Per-frame notes matter more on a phone than anywhere else, because the alternative is a paragraph typed into a mail app with no way to refer to a photograph except by describing it. We went through the mechanics in per-image comments beat whole-gallery feedback. The short version: a note pinned to a spot on the frame carries its own context, so the client types four words instead of a paragraph.

Spot position is also why normalised coordinates help. Appruva stores a tap as a fraction of the image, not a pixel. A tap at x = 195 on a 390-point-wide screen is 195 ÷ 390 = 0.5 of the width, which is pixel 3,000 on a 6,000-pixel-wide master. The retoucher at a desk sees the mark in the same place the client touched, whatever screen it was made on.

Set the size of the ask, not just the deadline

Phone clients drop out of long galleries. If you send 240 frames and want a decision on every one, you are asking for thirty minutes of unbroken attention. Arithmetic shows the gap: at 8 seconds a frame, 240 frames is 240 × 8 = 1,920 seconds, or 32 minutes. At 8 seconds a frame, 40 frames is 320 seconds, a little over 5 minutes, which fits in a lift ride and a queue.

The 8 seconds is an assumption chosen to make the arithmetic visible, not a measured industry figure; swap in your own. The point holds at any rate: cut the first round down. We argued the case for trimming in should clients see every frame or only your selects, and on a phone the case gets stronger, because every extra frame is another swipe.

A practical split is a first round of 30 to 50 curated frames for a yes/no pass on the phone, then a second, fuller round that the client opens at a desk if they want to go deeper.

Serve previews, not masters, over mobile data

A phone on a train platform may be on one bar of signal. If the review page pulls full-resolution masters, the client watches a spinner and gives up. Use the sizes below as illustrative assumptions, and substitute your own export settings.

A 390-point screen, even at three physical pixels per point, needs roughly 1,170 pixels across; sending 6,000 is wasted bytes the client pays for twice, once in time and once in data allowance. Appruva keeps a separate preview path for every image version for this reason, and the master stays untouched for the retoucher. Whatever tool you use, check that the preview, not the original, is what a phone downloads.

Also watch colour. Phones show images in a wide-gamut display profile while a desktop monitor may not, so a client can honestly report that skin looks warmer than you intended. Our piece on sRGB, Adobe RGB and Display P3 for client delivery covers which profile to export so both screens agree as closely as possible.

Write the email for a lock screen

Most phone reviews start from a notification, which shows about the first 40 characters of a subject line and one line of preview. Put the action and the date there.

Then keep the body to four lines: what the link is, what to do (pick, tap, type a line), the deadline, and who to call. No attachments, no second link, no signature block longer than the message. If you want a fuller structure for the whole round, running a client photo approval round without email sets one out.

Check your own process on a phone

Before the first client sees a round, run it yourself on the smallest screen you can find. Five checks take five minutes:

1. Open the link signed out, in a private tab. Does a photograph appear without any form?
2. Open a frame and rotate the phone. Does the image refit rather than crop?
3. Try to pick ten frames with one thumb. Can you reach every control?
4. Drop a note on a detail near the edge of the frame. Does it land where you tapped, and can you read it back?
5. Open the same link on a laptop. Is the note you made on the phone in the same place?

Foldables deserve a mention because clients do carry them. Appruva’s review screens put the photograph on one side of an open fold and the tools on the other, so nothing floats over the frame. On the outer, folded screen it keeps the ordinary phone layout. Whichever device you use, the test is the same: could a stranger approve a round with one hand?

If the desktop half of your workflow is just as loose, the same discipline applies at the other end. The retoucher should receive the client’s phone-made notes where they work, instead of retyping them. That hand-off is the subject of mapping every handoff from shoot to sign-off.