Galleries for private clients: events, portraits, weddings
Here is a recommended way of setting up galleries when working with private individuals, where privacy and simplicity are key.
Once you have set up a first gallery, it will be easy to reuse the same settings for other clients.
- Create a new gallery, ideally nested under a common "Client Area" gallery. Use the Private Gallery preset. The gallery will use the standard Gallery Style, which is a good balance between aesthetics and proofing functionality. The gallery will be hidden, i.e. not visible in the thumbnail navigation for maximum privacy.
- Click on the Private, hidden link to open the access settings. Set a password to access the gallery. Setting a general password will not provide you with as much detail as to who exactly accesses the gallery, but it will be very simple for your clients. Save.
- Optionally, you can allow commenting on images and/or star-rating (More / Comments and star rating).
- Upload the images into the gallery.
- If the images are for sale, attach the proper pricing profile(s) to all images in the gallery.
- Done! All you now have to do is send the link to your clients, with the password. To that avail, you can use the email feature under More / Email link.
It should look like this...
Allowing free high-res downloads to consumers
In some cases, you might want to allow your clients to download high-res files. This can be done by adding new authorizations to the access options.
Note that you can allow only specific clients, based on their email, to download the images. This has two benefits: you get a better control and view over who downloads what, and you can allow a wide group of people to purchase from the gallery (say wedding guests) while allowing a subset (e.g. groom and bride) to download high-res files for free. The drawback is that it requires your clients to create a login on your website in order to access the free downloads.
Alternatively, you can allow anybody with access to the gallery to download for free. This of course, will override any download pricing profile set for the individual images and won't provide you information on who downloads images.
Please refer to the help on authorizations for further help!