How Long Should Client Galleries Stay Online in 2026?

Picture a family photographer who sets every gallery to expire after 30 days because her storage plan is full.

Fourteen months later a client emails: the frame holding their favourite print broke in a house move, could she send the file again?

The gallery is gone, the originals sit on a drive in a cupboard, and finding one frame from one session takes an hour nobody pays for.

The expiry saved a few dollars of storage. It cost a reprint order, a favour, and an afternoon.

How long should client galleries stay online? Long enough to cover the months when clients actually come back, which is usually much later than the default most platforms suggest.

That makes the expiry date a revenue and service decision, and most photographers make it as a storage decision instead.

A client gallery expiry window is the period between publishing a delivered gallery and the link going dark, after which the client can no longer view, favourite or download the photos without contacting you.

This guide was rebuilt and re-verified on 12 October 2026: the expiry, reminder and storage behaviour of each platform below was re-read on the vendor's own help and pricing pages that day, Framekit's from its product code, and an unsourced claim about when reorders arrive has been replaced with a test you can run on your own inbox.

Full disclosure: Framekit makes one of the platforms compared here and has no print store, so where the money from a long-lived gallery is print and album orders, this guide says plainly that Pixieset, Pic-Time or ShootProof will collect it and Framekit will not.

How Long to Keep Each Kind of Gallery Online

The right window depends on what the gallery is for, because a proofing round, a finished wedding, a corporate headshot day and a boudoir session each carry a different risk if they close too early or stay open too long, so set the date by gallery type rather than with one studio-wide rule.

The pattern is simple once it is laid out: the more personal and long-lived the photographs, the longer the gallery should outlive the delivery, and the more sensitive the content, the shorter it should stay reachable by a forwarded link.

Why Clients Come Back Months After Delivery

Clients come back when life prompts them rather than when the gallery is fresh, so the requests that matter most land after the first quarter: anniversaries, holidays, house moves, a parent asking for a print, a new job needing a headshot, a frame that broke in a move.

The first fortnight is opening and downloading season. The couple shares the link with family, hearts their album picks and downloads the set. Almost nothing commercial happens, because everyone has just paid you.

Weeks three to twelve are quiet. This is the window a 30-day or 90-day policy covers, and it is the window where the fewest requests arrive.

Months four to eighteen are where the late requests live: a re-send of one file, a different crop for a canvas, an album upgrade after the first anniversary, a grandparent who wants prints for a birthday.

A gallery that closed at day 90 is invisible for the whole of that stretch.

Year two onwards is referral territory. A gallery still live at the second anniversary is a working link a couple can forward to an engaged friend, which is a different kind of value from a sale but often a larger one.

Our guide to using client galleries to get referrals covers how to make that forward land on your work.

We are not going to quote an industry percentage for any of this, because no gallery vendor publishes reorder timing across its customers. The test in the next section is better evidence than any average, because it uses your own clients.

Run It Yourself: Find Your Own Reorder Window

The most reliable way to set an expiry window is to look at when your own clients came back last year, because the answer differs sharply between a newborn studio, a wedding business and a headshot practice, and your inbox already holds the data.

Search your email for the last 12 months of messages from past clients containing words like "print", "album", "again", "file", "resend" or "copy".

For each one, note two dates: the delivery date of their gallery and the date of the request. Then sort the requests into four buckets: under 30 days, 31 to 90 days, 91 to 365 days and over a year.

Count what fell after day 90. Every one of those is a request your 90-day policy would have turned into an archive dig, or lost. Multiply the paid ones by your average order value; that is roughly what a 90-day expiry costs you each year.

Compare it with the annual difference between your current storage plan and the next one up.

For a studio with 100 clients a year, three paid requests after day 90 at $150 each is $450, which is more than two years of the difference between Framekit Starter and Pro billed yearly ($84 against $180).

If your own count comes back at zero, a shorter window is genuinely fine for your work, and the storage savings are real.

Step 1: Separate Viewing, Downloading and Ordering

Treat viewing, downloading and ordering as three separate rights with three separate end dates, because collapsing them into one expiry date is what causes most of the trouble in this area: a single date either closes the gallery before the late requests arrive or leaves downloads open forever.

Viewing: 12 months. The gallery stays published so the client can browse, heart new favourites and forward the link. This is the cheap right to grant, since a viewable gallery costs storage and nothing else.

Downloading: a stated deadline at 60 to 90 days. A download deadline creates useful urgency and stops your gallery becoming the client's only backup. Say it at delivery and once more before it passes.

Ordering: as long as the gallery is live. On a print-store platform, the ordering window is where the money is, and it should match the viewing window.

How you enforce the download deadline depends on the platform.

On Framekit, downloads are a switch per gallery and can sit behind a separate download PIN, so after day 90 you can switch downloads off and leave the gallery viewable, or keep downloads on and simply stop chasing.

The second is the friendlier choice: the deadline becomes a request rather than a lock, and the year-long viewing window carries the late requests.

One mechanic to know: when a Framekit client downloads the whole gallery, the ZIP they generate is kept for 7 days, and a client who comes back within that week is offered the existing file instead of waiting for a new one.

After that, a fresh download is built from the originals. Every download is the full-resolution original; there is no web-size option for clients.

Step 2: Size Your Storage for the Policy You Want

Size your plan for the number of galleries live at the same time under your chosen policy, because storage, not intent, is what usually sets the expiry date, and the arithmetic is simple enough to do before you pick a plan rather than after the first warning email.

At steady state, a 12-month policy keeps roughly a year of deliveries online at once, a 90-day policy keeps about three months, and an indefinite policy grows every year.

Use 10MB per delivered full-resolution JPEG as a planning figure: a 60-frame portrait session is about 600MB, a 500-frame wedding about 5GB.

The step that costs money is the jump from a 90-day to a 12-month policy: on Framekit it is the move from Starter to Pro, $96 a year on yearly billing.

Framekit's pool is shared with your website and video review, so leave a few gigabytes for the site itself, and remember that video has its own share of the pool: 3GB on Free, 15GB on Starter, 150GB on Pro and 750GB on Business.

One more Framekit detail that changes the arithmetic: expiry frees no storage. An expired gallery returns to draft with its files intact so you can republish it, which means it still counts against your pool.

To reclaim space you delete the gallery's files, so keep your own archive copy first.

Halving what you deliver halves the bill. A 1,000-frame wedding culled to 500 needs half the storage and gets reviewed more closely; our guide to how many photos to deliver has genre-by-genre counts.

Step 3: What a 12-Month Policy Costs on Each Platform

A 12-month policy costs between $138 and $504 a year for a 25-wedding stills studio depending on the platform, and between $138 and $252 for a 100-session portrait studio, because each vendor draws its storage tiers in different places and some count video separately.

Prices are the yearly-billed rates on each vendor's own pricing page, re-read on 12 October 2026; Framekit, Pixieset and ShootProof prices are from the figures verified for our Framekit vs Pixieset and Framekit vs ShootProof comparisons, Zenfolio's from its pricing page and SmugMug's from its plans page.

The honest reading: for a stills-only wedding studio that keeps galleries live for a year, SmugMug's unlimited storage is the cheapest way to never think about space again, though it is an archive rather than a delivery-first gallery.

Zenfolio is the cheapest delivery gallery at both sizes, at $138 for 150GB, and adds a 7% fee to every print order.

Framekit is the cheapest that also includes a full website and films in the same gallery, but it sells no prints, so a studio whose late requests are mostly print orders will earn more on Pixieset, Pic-Time or ShootProof than it saves on storage.

Step 4: Set the Date and the Reminder Before You Send

Set any expiry date and its reminder before the link goes out, because a date added after sending needs its own explanation, and a reminder that is not configured in advance is the step that gets forgotten in a busy season, which is exactly when galleries quietly close on clients.

On Framekit. Auto Expiry is a per-gallery setting and is off by default, so a gallery with no date stays published until you take it down.

Set a date and, once it passes, a daily job unpublishes the gallery and returns it to draft with every photo, video and favourite list intact.

Anyone opening the link sees a short page saying the gallery is no longer available and asking them to contact the photographer.

Switch on the expiry reminder and Framekit emails you and every contact linked to the gallery 3 days before the date, with a link to open the gallery and download before it closes.

Link the client as a contact in the gallery's settings first, or the reminder only reaches you.

Two limits worth knowing: there is one reminder, at 3 days, and its wording is fixed and in English, even when the gallery itself is set to one of the other six languages.

If you want a longer runway or a reminder in Spanish or German, send your own email from the gallery's share screen a week or two earlier.

On Pixieset. Its help centre documents an Auto Expiry date per collection that switches the collection to Hidden at 11:59pm local time rather than deleting it, and up to 3 automated reminders on the days you choose, which can include the download PIN and password; targeting reminders by client activity needs an upgraded plan, per its expiry reminder article.

On Pic-Time. Clients are notified 1 week, 4 days and 1 day before expiry, with editable wording, according to its help article on expiration emails, and an optional expiration automation can run a last-chance coupon for a set number of days before the gallery closes.

The practical difference: Pixieset and Pic-Time give you a longer, more configurable runway and tie it to selling; Framekit gives you one short reminder to you and the client, plus your own email for anything earlier.

Step 5: Put the Policy in the Contract

Write the windows into the delivery clause of your contract in three plain sentences, because a client who agreed to a date in writing rarely argues about it, and a date that only exists in your platform settings becomes a dispute the first time it surprises someone.

First, the download deadline: "High-resolution files can be downloaded from your online gallery for 90 days from the delivery date; please save a copy to your own devices within that time."

Second, the viewing window: "Your gallery stays online for 12 months from delivery, so you can browse, share it with family and choose favourites."

Third, the escape hatch: "After 12 months the gallery is taken offline and the files are archived. We can reactivate an archived gallery for 30 days for a fee of $35, subject to archive availability."

That last clause protects you in year four, when a drive has failed and someone asks for a file you no longer hold. "Subject to archive availability" is an honest sentence, not a weasel one, if you also tell clients to keep their own copies.

Step 6: Tell the Client Twice, in Their Inbox

Tell the client about the deadline twice, once in the delivery email and once shortly before it passes, because a deadline mentioned only in the contract is forgotten by the time it matters, and a gallery that closes silently is the fastest route from a delighted client to an angry review.

In the delivery email, put the date on its own line: "Downloads open until 10 January 2027.

The gallery stays online until 10 October 2027." Our guide to writing a photo delivery email has templates with that line built in.

Before the download deadline, send a one-paragraph nudge about 7 days out.

On Framekit you can send it from the gallery's share screen to up to 20 recipients at once, using the starter reminder template or your own saved one, and include the gallery password in the email if you set one.

Before the gallery closes, let the automatic reminder do its job: Framekit's 3-day email, Pixieset's up to three, or Pic-Time's three.

Check whether anyone opened the gallery before you chase.

Framekit's Activity panel lists every download, whole-gallery ZIPs and single photos, with the client's email, the photo count and the PIN used, plus every favourite list; both tables export to CSV.

If a gallery shows no downloads at day 60, that client needs a personal message, not a template.

Our guide to getting clients to download their photos covers the follow-up in detail.

Step 7: Archive at 12 Months, Never Delete

Archive rather than delete when a gallery reaches the end of its window, because deleting destroys the fastest route back to a sale or a favour, while unpublishing keeps the structure intact so a reactivation is a toggle rather than a rebuild from a drive in a cupboard.

Unpublish, do not delete, first. On Framekit, unpublishing or expiring returns the gallery to draft with its sets, cover and favourite lists intact; republishing puts it back at the same address.

On Pixieset, an expired collection becomes Hidden and is restored by changing the date and republishing.

Move the originals to cold storage when space runs short. Keep delivered JPEGs on two drives and one offsite copy, named "2026-06-14 Harper-Lee Wedding" rather than by job code, so a request in 2029 takes a minute to answer.

Our comparison of photo backup solutions covers the offsite half.

Delete from the platform only after the archive is confirmed. Open three random files from the archive copy before you delete the gallery's photos to free space. A gallery is a delivery copy, never your backup.

Charge to reactivate. $25 to $50 for 30 days back online is the common range. It turns a support request into a small billable job and stops the same client asking every Christmas.

Keeping Galleries Online in Framekit

Framekit is an AI website builder with client galleries, video review, Slides and a digital-download store on one account, and its galleries are built for the long-lived policy this guide recommends: expiry is opt-in, an expired gallery keeps its files, and the gallery sits on your own site, at a framekit.ai address on Free and on your own domain from Starter.

The number that matters$0 for unlimited galleries with every feature, including expiry, reminders, the download PIN and the Activity panel, inside a 10GB pool on Free.

A 12-month policy for most working studios lands on Pro at $19 a month, or $15 billed yearly, for 300GB, and Business holds 2TB for $39, or $31 billed yearly.

The detail most platforms do not offerfilms live in the same gallery as the stills, so a hybrid studio keeps the wedding film online for the same 12 months without a second service. Per-file video caps are 500MB on Free, 1GB on Starter, 2GB on Pro and 3GB on Business, up to 2 hours a film.

The gotchaone reminder, 3 days before, in English, and expiry frees no storage because the files stay. If you want a 14-day runway, a reminder in the client's language or space back the day a gallery closes, you do those by hand.

What it does not dono print ordering or lab fulfilment, no price sheets, no native mobile app, no client uploads, no RAW files, no unlimited storage and no school or volume workflows. A gallery holds up to 5,000 photos.

Verdict: if your late requests are re-sends, crops and favours rather than print orders, Framekit lets you keep a year of galleries online on your own domain for the price of the site you already need; if they are print orders, keep galleries on a print-store platform for the year and let it collect them.

Where Framekit Fits and Where It Loses

Framekit fits the photographer whose galleries are mostly digital delivery, who wants them on their own domain beside the portfolio, and who would rather pay for one storage pool than a gallery plan plus a site plan, and it loses wherever a long-lived gallery is meant to keep selling physical products.

It fits a hybrid studio delivering stills and a film from the same day, since both stay online in one gallery for a year under one plan.

It fits a portrait studio that answers late requests itself and wants the Activity panel to show who never downloaded. It fits anyone who wants expiry off by default rather than a countdown that starts without asking.

It loses to Pic-Time and Pixieset when the reason to keep a gallery online is the print and album revenue it collects, since Framekit has no store for physical products and cannot run a last-chance discount before expiry.

It loses to Pixieset on reminders, since Pixieset allows three on the days you choose and Framekit sends one at 3 days.

It loses to SmugMug for a stills archive kept forever, because SmugMug stores unlimited JPEGs and Framekit tops out at 2TB on Business.

Our head-to-heads with Pic-Time, SmugMug and Zenfolio put numbers on each trade.

What Happens When a Gallery Closes or a Plan Lapses

Expiry, unpublishing, deletion and a cancelled subscription are four different events that photographers routinely confuse, and each one does something different to the client's link, your files and your ability to bring the gallery back.

Expiry on Framekit, Pixieset and most platforms takes the gallery offline and keeps the files, so it is reversible.

Unpublishing by hand does the same thing without a date, and is the right move when a client asks for a gallery to come down early.

Deleting photos is the only one of the four that frees storage on Framekit and the only one that cannot be undone without your own copies.

A plan lapse or downgrade is the one to check before you rely on it.

Pic-Time's help centre documents that its free plan shrinks from 10GB to 3GB three months after the account is created and that galleries over the limit are permanently deleted a week later, oldest first.

Framekit's free plan is permanent at 10GB and does not shrink, so the question there is simply whether your live galleries fit in 10GB alongside your site.

A transfer link is the harshest case: WeTransfer-style links expire in days by design, which is why they belong nowhere near a client relationship; our client gallery vs WeTransfer comparison covers the difference.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should client galleries stay online?

Finished client galleries should stay online for 12 months by default, with a stated download deadline at 60 to 90 days, while proofing galleries need only 14 to 21 days.

Re-send, crop and album requests tend to arrive after the first quarter, so a 30-day or 90-day expiry closes the gallery before most late requests. Wedding galleries are often left online indefinitely when storage allows.

What happens when a Framekit gallery expires?

When a Framekit gallery's expiry date passes, a daily job unpublishes it and returns it to draft with every photo, video and favourite list intact, and visitors see a page asking them to contact the photographer.

Nothing is deleted, so you can republish it at the same address. If the reminder is on, you and every linked contact get an email 3 days before.

Does an expired gallery still use my storage?

On Framekit, yes: an expired gallery keeps its files so you can republish it, and those files still count against your pool. To free space, delete the gallery's photos after confirming your own archive copy.

Expiry is a visibility setting on most platforms, not a storage setting, so check the vendor's help pages before assuming a closed gallery costs nothing.

Can I extend a gallery after it has expired?

Yes, on Framekit and Pixieset. On Framekit, change or clear the expiry date and republish the draft, and the gallery returns at its old address with its favourite lists.

Pixieset documents the same: change or remove the Auto Expiry date and set the collection back to Published. Charge a published reactivation fee, commonly $25 to $50 for 30 days.

Do Framekit galleries that stay online help my SEO?

No. Framekit marks every client gallery page noindex, so galleries never appear in Google results however long they stay live, which is the right behaviour for private client work.

The value of a long-lived gallery is people, not rankings: each forwarded link opens on your own domain, under your studio name, beside the portfolio site it belongs to.

How many expiry reminders does each platform send?

Framekit sends one optional reminder 3 days before expiry to you and every contact linked to the gallery. Pixieset allows up to 3 reminders on the days you choose and can include the password and download PIN.

Pic-Time notifies clients 1 week, 4 days and 1 day before. If you need more lead time on Framekit, send your own email from the gallery's share screen.

Should downloads close before the gallery does?

Usually, yes, as a stated deadline rather than a lock.

A 60 to 90 day download deadline gets clients to save their files while you still hold them on fast storage, and the gallery stays viewable for the rest of the year for re-sends and favourites.

On Framekit, switch downloads off per gallery or keep them behind a download PIN if you want to enforce it.

How long do download links in a Framekit gallery last?

A Framekit gallery's download button works for as long as the gallery is published and downloads are switched on.

When a client downloads the whole gallery, the ZIP they generate is kept for 7 days and offered again if they come back within that week; after that, a new archive is built from the originals. Every download is the full-resolution original.

What is a fair fee to reactivate an expired gallery?

Between $25 and $50 for 30 days back online is the common range, published in your contract rather than invented on the day.

The fee covers finding the archive, confirming the files and resending the link, and it turns a support email into a small billable job. Photographers who reactivate for free tend to get the same request every year.

How much storage do I need to keep a year of galleries online?

About 60GB for 100 portrait sessions of 60 photos, and about 125GB for 25 weddings of 500 photos, at roughly 10MB per full-resolution JPEG.

On Framekit both fit Pro's 300GB pool at $180 a year billed yearly; on Pixieset the wedding studio needs Pro at $288, and on Pic-Time it needs Advanced at $504.

What happens to my galleries if I stop paying?

It depends on the platform, so read its downgrade terms before you rely on a long policy. Pic-Time's free plan shrinks to 3GB three months after sign-up and permanently deletes galleries over the limit a week later.

Framekit's free plan is permanent at 10GB and does not shrink, but an account over its storage limit cannot publish or republish a gallery until space is freed, so check that your live galleries fit.

Is Framekit or Pixieset better for keeping galleries online long term?

Pixieset is better if long-lived galleries are meant to sell prints and albums, since its store and up to three configurable reminders keep working for the whole window.

Framekit is better if they are digital deliveries, because expiry is off by default, films sit in the same gallery, and one $180-a-year Pro plan keeps a year of weddings online alongside your website.

The Verdict

Keep finished galleries online for a year, state a download deadline at 60 to 90 days, keep proofing rounds short, and archive rather than delete when the window ends, because the requests that matter arrive late and the storage that pays for them is usually one plan tier.

Choose the platform by what the late requests are. If they are print and album orders, a print-store platform keeps collecting them for the whole year, and Framekit is not the tool for that.

If they are re-sends, crops and favours, Framekit keeps a year of photo and film deliveries online on your own domain, with expiry off by default and files kept when a gallery closes.

Do the inbox test before your next delivery. It takes twenty minutes, and it replaces a guess about your expiry window with a number.

Related readinghow to create a client gallery, how much client galleries cost, what to include in a client gallery, how to deliver photos to clients and how to protect client photos online.

Choosing a platformthe full client gallery platform comparison, is Pixieset worth it, Framekit vs Pixieset and Pixieset vs ShootProof.