Proofing galleries for family and portrait sessions

A one-hour family session can easily produce more good frames than a family will ever print or frame. Many family and portrait photographers sell a set number of edited images, or retouch only the photos the client chooses, so the selection step is where the session turns into a finished order. If that step happens over a long email thread with file numbers typed out by hand, it’s slow for the client and error-prone for you.

A proofing gallery in PhotoShr is built for this. Clients browse the session, tap a heart on the photos they love, look over their picks once more on a review screen, and send them to you. You see the selection in your dashboard straight away, and each gallery in your list shows where its selection stands.

Family sessions rarely have one decision-maker. Parents choose, grandparents have opinions, and sometimes the teenager has a veto. In PhotoShr each person keeps their own private selection list, so nobody overwrites anyone else’s choices. You see every person’s picks overlaid on the gallery and ranked by votes — the photos three people chose rise to the top, which makes it easy to suggest a final set.

On a passcode gallery, relatives can even start picking before they’ve told the gallery who they are, and save their selection with nothing more than an email address — no account and no password to remember. That matters when the person whose opinion counts most is a grandparent on a tablet.

Family work is personal, and clients notice how their photos are presented. Choose from the full range of gallery looks for the cover, the grid and the full-screen viewer, and pick the one that fits the session: soft and quiet for a newborn shoot, bolder for a seasonal mini-session. You can organise longer sessions into sets — the whole family, the children, the couple — so it’s easy to find a particular pose.

Your watermark and logo are applied automatically to proofs, which helps when a proofing gallery gets passed around the family. For a gallery where you’d rather show clean, high-quality proofs, turn watermarking off for that gallery alone.

• Share passcode by default. Every new gallery is protected by a passcode; send the link and the code together.
• Invited clients only when you want it locked to the people you emailed. They sign in with a magic link or a one-time code, never a password.
• Search engines are kept out. Client galleries are never listed, whatever the access setting.
• A client portal where returning families find every shoot you’ve delivered them — useful when you photograph the same family every year.

Once the selection is in, export it as a CSV or a plain list of filenames to pull the chosen frames up in Lightroom or Capture One, then edit as usual. Upload the finished photos to the gallery’s delivery tab and send them: the family gets a “your photos are ready” email and a delivery page where they can download everything at once or save single photos at full size or web size. Prints and frames are up to you — PhotoShr doesn’t sell prints, so the client relationship and the order stay yours.

On the Studio plan the delivery page can carry a cover image, a personal message and a link to book the next session — the natural moment to mention next year’s family shoot or a first-birthday session. Studio also keeps client records with your own notes, phone numbers and tags.

The example galleries include a family and newborn session and a Christmas family session — open one and try picking favourites as your clients would. Our proofing workflow guide has practical advice on how many photos to show and how to set deadlines, and the pricing page lists exactly what each plan includes.