How to send large photo files to clients

Delivery is the last thing standing between a finished edit and getting paid, and it is the part nobody teaches. The file set is too big to email, the client is not technical, and half the tools want one of you to sign up. Here is every route that works, what each one really costs, and which one to use depending on whether this is a sneak peek, a full delivery, or a handoff to another professional.

Three different jobs, not one

Most delivery advice fails because it treats one job as three. Separate them and the answer becomes obvious.

The handoff. A one time send: sneak peeks tonight, the delivered set, a folder to a retoucher, a second shooter's card. It has a recipient, a deadline, and no reason to exist afterward. Speed and size are what matter.

The gallery. The client's home for their photos, where they favorite, download, and order prints, weeks after the wedding. Presentation and retention are what matter.

The archive. Your copy, held for years, that no client ever touches. Durability and cost per terabyte are what matter.

Using a gallery for a handoff is slow and expensive. Using a handoff tool as an archive loses your work. Nearly every delivery problem is one of those two mistakes.

Transfer services

Built for the handoff: upload, get a link, send it, the files disappear later. Nothing to install for either side and the recipient needs no account.

The catch is the free tier. WeTransfer's free plan, per their help center, allows up to 10 transfers or 3 GB total in any 30 day rolling window, kept online up to 3 days · which one wedding will exhaust on the first send. Most alternatives sit in the same range, because the tiers are sized for documents rather than cards.

Kepla Free File Transfer is the photographer sized version: 10 GB in one transfer, no monthly cap, no account, folders keeping their structure inside one ZIP, up to 10 recipients emailed, and a link the sender sets from 1 to 48 hours. It is free because it exists to introduce photographers to Kepla for Mac, and the only ask is that you tell someone about it. The full comparison is here.

Use when: sneak peeks, delivered sets, professional handoffs, anything with a deadline and no afterlife.

Cloud drives

Google Drive, Dropbox and iCloud all move gigabytes reliably, and you are probably already paying for one. For a colleague who also lives in that ecosystem, sharing a folder is genuinely the fastest thing on this page.

For clients, three problems recur. Permissions confuse non technical people, and you will spend a call explaining why the link says request access. Downloading many files means either a browser ZIP the service builds on demand or a per file slog. And the folder lives in your account forever, quietly consuming the storage you pay for, long after the client stopped caring.

Use when: the recipient is another professional, or the files need to stay put for ongoing collaboration.

Client galleries

Pic Time, Pixieset, ShootProof, CloudSpot and their peers exist for the middle job. The client gets a branded, beautiful place to look at their photos, favorite them, download at chosen sizes and order prints, and it stays up for months.

They are the right tool for the delivered set and often pay for themselves in print sales. They are the wrong tool for a fast handoff: upload and processing take time you do not have when the couple wants three frames for Instagram tonight, and you would not build a gallery to send a folder to a retoucher.

Use when: it is the client's finished set and presentation is part of what they paid for.

Physical media

A USB drive in a nice box still has a place as a keepsake, and posting a drive is occasionally the only sane answer for very large RAW archives, where a courier genuinely beats an upload.

But it is not a delivery method on its own. Drives get lost, sit unopened in drawers, and fail silently after a few years. If you hand one over, hand it over in addition to a digital delivery, not instead of one, and do not treat it as the client's backup.

Use when: it is a gift, or the volume is genuinely beyond what a connection can carry in reasonable time.

Which one, when

Two things to do before anything leaves your machine. Strip metadata from anything going somewhere public, because a JPEG carries your gear, sometimes serial numbers, and sometimes the GPS coordinates of a private home · the metadata remover does it losslessly in your browser. And convert RAW to JPG for anyone who is not a photographer, because they cannot open it and will say the files are broken · the converter runs in the browser too.

And the real bottleneck is upstream of all of it. Four thousand frames have to become the few hundred worth delivering, and that evening is the one you are actually losing. Kepla for Mac clears the blinks, misfires and duplicates on your machine, offline, and names the reason on every frame it sets aside. The photographer selects; Kepla clears. Request Founding Access.

FAQ