GalleryLink Now Hosts Your Photos: Direct Uploads, a Studio Plan, and One-Click ZIPs

Since the day it launched, GalleryLink has done one thing on purpose: turn the Google Drive folder you already have into a client gallery, without storing a single photo itself. That isn't changing. But as of this week there's a second way to fill a gallery — upload the photos straight to GalleryLink — and with it, the biggest set of features we've ever shipped at once: a new 250 GB Studio plan, one-click ZIP delivery, watermarked previews, download lead capture, quotes on inquiries, and custom domains.

This post walks through everything in the release: what the uploader actually does under the hood, what each plan now includes, why the pricing works the way it does, and — because it's the question that matters — an honest guide to when you should keep using Drive and when uploading is the better call.

Table of Contents

• What changed, in one minute
• Can you use GalleryLink without Google Drive now?
• Inside the new uploader
  • Folders become scenes
  • Resumable, direct-to-storage uploads
  • The preview fills in while you upload
• Watch it work
• The new plans and storage
• ZIP downloads: the end of "can you send them all in one file?"
• Watermarks that never touch the originals
• Turn downloads into leads
• Quotes and approvals, straight from your studio page
• Custom domains are live
• Drive or upload: an honest decision guide
• What's next

What changed, in one minute

When you click New gallery, you now choose between two cards. Link a Drive folder is the workflow GalleryLink was built on: paste a folder shared as "Anyone with the link", and the gallery reads it live — nothing re-uploaded, no storage bill, always in sync. Upload photos is new: drag files or whole folders into the form and GalleryLink stores them and serves them worldwide from Cloudflare's edge network.

Everything downstream is identical. Same seven themes and seven layouts, same fullscreen lightbox, same favorites and album selection, same passwords, same stats, same studio page. Your client cannot tell which kind of gallery they're looking at — and you can mix both kinds freely in one account, choosing per job.

The point of this release isn't to move you off Drive. It's that the choice is finally yours, per gallery, inside one subscription.

Can you use GalleryLink without Google Drive now?

Yes — completely. Until this week, the honest answer to "what if my client's office blocks Google?" or "what if I don't want deliveries counting against my Google One quota?" was: GalleryLink isn't the tool for that job. Hosted platforms like Pixieset and Pic-Time existed precisely for photographers who wanted their gallery service to be the storage.

Now both models live in the same product. That combination is genuinely unusual: hosted platforms don't read your Drive, and Drive-reading tools don't host. GalleryLink does both, and the second model costs less than the storage-tiered incumbents — more on the pricing logic below, and there's a feature-by-feature breakdown on our updated Pixieset and Pic-Time comparison pages.

What stays exactly the same

Drive-linked galleries behave precisely as they always have — read live on every load, so a photo dropped into the folder appears in the link your client already has. If your deliveries all start life as a Drive backup anyway, as they do for most of our photographers, nothing about your workflow needs to change today. The wedding, real-estate and event guides all still describe that flow, because it's still the fastest delivery there is.

Inside the new uploader

Anyone who has fed 1,400 JPEGs into a browser uploader knows the failure modes: the tab you don't dare close, the one file that stalls at 92%, the hotel wifi that drops at photo 900 and takes the whole queue with it. The uploader was designed around those failure modes, not around the happy path.

Folders become scenes

Drag an entire shoot folder in — or pick it with the folder chooser, no dragging required — and its first-level subfolders become named scenes in the gallery: Getting Ready, Ceremony, Reception. This is the exact behaviour Drive-linked galleries have always had with subfolders, so a delivery organized the way you already organize exports needs no reshuffling. A 900-frame wedding never lands as one endless wall of thumbnails.

Resumable, direct-to-storage uploads

Two implementation details matter here, and both are things you'd only notice when they're missing:

• Bytes go straight from your browser to the storage bucket — they never pass through our application servers. This is the same presigned-upload pattern the big cloud vendors use internally, and it's why the uploader saturates whatever connection you have instead of queueing behind a middleman.
• Large files upload in parts, and progress survives interruptions. Close the laptop mid-upload, reopen it, drop the same files in again — the queue continues from the parts that already made it, instead of starting the 4 GB film over. Failed files get a retry button rather than failing the whole batch.

Image dimensions are read in your browser before upload, so galleries render with zero layout shift — the masonry knows every photo's shape before a single pixel arrives, the same trick we use with Drive's metadata.

The preview fills in while you upload

Uploading happens inside the create form, not on a separate screen afterwards. Type the title, drag the folder in, and the live preview on the right fills with your actual photos as they land — so you're choosing the theme, layout and cover photo against the real shoot, not placeholders. By the time the progress bar finishes, the gallery is usually already designed. Then it's one click to the same share screen Drive galleries get: copy link, email it, or print a QR card.

Photos get their own management page after that: reorder by dragging, move photos between scenes, set the cover, delete mistakes. Deleting an uploaded photo really deletes it — storage is refunded to your quota immediately.

Watch it work

The walkthrough below covers the whole delivery flow end to end. It was recorded with a Drive-linked gallery — the uploader drops into the same create form you'll see here, as a second card at the first step.

The new plans and storage

Every plan now includes hosted storage alongside its Drive-linked galleries:

Plan	Price	Hosted storage	Drive-linked galleries	Adds
Free	$0	2 GB	1 gallery	Editorial & Minimal themes, Masonry & Grid
Pro	$5/mo or $50/yr	10 GB	Unlimited	Everything: passwords, all themes, studio site, Event Suite, stats
Studio	$15/mo or $150/yr	250 GB	Unlimited	ZIP downloads, watermarks, video hosting

If you're on Pro, you just got a free upgrade

Nothing about your price changes, and you gained 10 GB of hosted storage. That's enough to host a handful of full shoots outright, or to keep Drive as your backbone and use uploads only for the occasional client who can't touch Google. Existing galleries are untouched.

Why Studio is priced the way it is

Storage-tiered gallery platforms have a cost problem they pass on to you: every client download is bandwidth they pay their cloud vendor for, so heavy delivery months eat their margin, and the pricing tiers climb accordingly. GalleryLink's hosted galleries sit on Cloudflare R2, where egress — the downloading — costs nothing at all. Your clients can pull the full-resolution wedding five times over and it costs us pennies, which is why 250 GB lands at $15/month while comparable tiers elsewhere run twice that or more. 250 GB is roughly forty complete weddings hosted simultaneously, at full resolution.

One honest caveat about quotas: they're enforced on real bytes. The uploader shows your usage as you go, presigning checks it before a byte moves, and the server re-verifies against the actual stored size when each file lands — so the meter you see is the meter that's true.

ZIP downloads: the end of "can you send them all in one file?"

Every photographer knows this email. The gallery is beautiful, the downloads are full-resolution, and the client still asks for everything in one file — because tapping download 600 times isn't a workflow, and because that's what WeTransfer trained everyone to expect.

On Studio, uploaded galleries grow a Download all button. It streams the entire gallery as a single ZIP archive — the untouched originals, byte for byte, organized into folders that match your scenes. The archive is assembled on the fly as it downloads, so there's no "preparing your file" wait and no size ceiling worth mentioning; the browser shows real progress because the exact size is computed up front.

It works for selections too: when a client submits their album picks, you can pull just those frames as one ZIP from your dashboard — ready to hand to Lightroom as a folder instead of a filename list.

Watermarks that never touch the originals

Proofing sets have a tension: the client needs to see every frame well enough to choose, and you'd rather unpaid previews didn't circulate as finished work. The classic answer — exporting a second, watermarked copy of the whole shoot — doubles your work and your storage.

Studio's watermarking happens at serving time instead. Set your mark once (your studio name rendered as a clean overlay, or upload your own logo file), then flip the switch per gallery. Every preview and thumbnail carries the mark; every download delivers the clean original. Turn it off after the invoice clears and the same gallery becomes the final delivery — no re-export, no second gallery, no second link to explain.

Turn downloads into leads

A wedding gallery gets opened by far more people than the couple: parents, the bridal party, the planner, and — this is the part that matters for your business — engaged friends. Industry surveys have long put referrals and word of mouth at the heart of how photographers get booked; the PPA has been saying it for years.

The new download gate makes that audience visible. Switch on Ask for email before download and visitors are asked once — a single, polite prompt — before their first download unlocks. Every address lands in your dashboard next to the client picks, so the delivery link you sent one couple quietly builds next season's mailing list. It's off by default, per gallery, because for corporate work you may not want any friction at all.

Quotes and approvals, straight from your studio page

Your studio page's inquiry form already drops leads into a small pipeline in your dashboard. Now you can answer them with more than an email: attach a price and terms to any inquiry and send it as a quote. The client gets a clean page with the amount and what's included, plus two buttons — approve or decline. You're notified the moment they answer, and an approval moves the inquiry to Booked on its own.

No PDFs, no invoicing suite, no client account. It's deliberately the smallest version of this feature that closes the loop between "someone asked about a date" and "the date is booked" — the same philosophy as the rest of the product.

Custom domains are live

Pro and Studio accounts can now serve their studio page and every gallery from their own domain — gallery.yourstudio.com instead of a subdomain of ours. Save the domain in Studio settings, add one CNAME record at your DNS provider, and watch the status badge walk from Waiting for DNS to Issuing certificate to Active on its own — SSL included, usually within the hour. Your .gallerylink.live address keeps working alongside it, so nothing you've already shared breaks.

Drive or upload: an honest decision guide

Here's the part a launch post usually skips. We built uploads, we're proud of them — and most of your galleries should probably still be Drive-linked. The decision comes down to where your files already are and what the specific delivery needs:

Situation	Use	Why
Finished sets already land in Drive as backups	Drive	The backup is the delivery. Zero extra storage, zero upload time, syncs forever.
Archive galleries you want online for years	Drive	An old wedding costs nothing extra to keep live — anniversaries are when print orders happen.
Client's office blocks Google services	Upload	Corporate networks that block Drive can't see Drive-served photos. Hosted galleries serve from our edge instead.
You want ZIP delivery or watermarks	Upload	Both need the files on our storage to work.
Delivery shouldn't count against your Drive quota	Upload	Plan storage is separate from your Google One space.
Same-day sneak peeks during an event	Drive	Photos appear in the link as your export syncs — see the same-day workflow.

And because it's the same product either way, this isn't a decision you make once. Deliver the wedding from Drive, upload the corporate headshots, and both sit side by side on your dashboard and your studio page.

What's next

Two things this release deliberately doesn't include, so you're not surprised later. Phone video playback: iPhones record in HEVC, which most non-Apple browsers can't play natively; uploaded HEVC files download perfectly but may not preview everywhere, and proper transcoded streaming for every device is next on the list. One-click Drive import: converting an existing Drive gallery into a hosted one currently means re-uploading the folder yourself; a built-in migration is planned.

The complete release history lives on the changelog, and the docs now cover the upload flow step by step. If you want to try it right now, create an upload gallery — the free plan's 2 GB needs no card and fits a real shoot. And if you try it and something feels rough, tell us; half of this release exists because photographers did exactly that.