Delivering photos to clients in Egypt

Most advice about delivering photographs is written for a photographer whose clients are on home fibre and read email. If your clients are Egyptian families, three of the assumptions underneath it are wrong, and they are the three that decide whether a delivery lands.

The gallery is opened on a phone, on mobile data

Not on a laptop, and usually not on wifi. This is the single most important fact about delivery here, and it changes what a gallery has to be good at.

A gallery that loads full-size images and resizes them in the browser can be a hundred megabytes for one screen of thumbnails. On a good connection that is a slow page. On congested mobile data it is a page that never finishes, and the client concludes their photographs are broken.

What to check, on a real phone with wifi turned off:

• How long until the first row of thumbnails appears?
• Does scrolling load more, or does it stall?
• Does opening one photograph full-screen take a second or ten?
• Try it again on 3G in a bad spot, not just on 4G in the city.

The technical property that makes the difference is whether the platform generates small preview files and serves them from a location near your client, or ships the original and lets the browser cope. Ask, and then test rather than believe the answer.

Delivery happens over WhatsApp

Email is for invoices and for foreign clients. A gallery link sent by email to an Egyptian couple may genuinely never be read; the same link on WhatsApp is opened within the hour.

Which has practical consequences for how the link should behave:

• It must preview sensibly when pasted into a chat — a link with no title and no image looks like spam and gets ignored.
• It must open in the in-app browser without a login wall. Anything requiring an account will lose a meaningful fraction of the family.
• The password, if there is one, has to be typeable on a phone keyboard. Latin characters, short, memorable.

See passwords and guest links for how to choose one that is not a support ticket.

Arabic filenames and titles break in most tools

This is a small thing that reads as carelessness. A gallery titled حفل هنا وعمر or a file named in Arabic will, in a lot of software, render with its punctuation and numbers in the wrong order, or as a row of question marks, or reversed outright.

The cause is almost always the same two bugs: text stored or served in the wrong encoding, and mixed Arabic-and-Latin text laid out without telling the browser which direction the string runs in. Both are fixable and neither is exotic; they just require someone to have cared.

Test it before you commit to a platform. Upload one file with an Arabic name, title a gallery in Arabic, and look at the result in the gallery, in the download, and in the email. If any of the three is mangled, you will be renaming files in Latin script forever.

Getting paid, and what a subscription costs you

Two separate problems, and photographers here usually conflate them.

Being paid by your client is mostly local: cash, Instapay, a bank transfer, or a wallet. Nothing about a delivery platform changes that, and no international gallery product is going to collect Egyptian client payments for you.

Paying for the platform is where the friction is. Many photography tools price in dollars and bill monthly to a card, which for an Egyptian card can mean declines, a foreign-currency fee, and a bill that moves with the exchange rate. Worth pricing the annual cost in pounds at today's rate before committing, and worth checking that the service accepts your card at all before you have clients depending on it.

Storage adds up faster than you expect

A wedding at 800 frames and 8 MB each is around 6 GB. Two weddings a month is 150 GB a year, and that is before previews. Any plan measured in single-digit gigabytes will hold roughly one job.

Decide early whether you are keeping delivered galleries online indefinitely or closing them after a few months. Both are reasonable. Only one of them is a bill that stops growing — and either way, the master copies live on your own drives, not in a delivery tool.

The short version

1. Test the gallery on a phone on mobile data before you trust it with a client.
2. Send the link on WhatsApp, and make sure it previews properly there.
3. Test one Arabic filename and one Arabic title before committing.
4. Price the platform annually in pounds, and check your card works.
5. Assume storage grows by about 150 GB a year at two weddings a month.
6. Keep your masters yourself. Every delivery tool is a way of handing files over, not a place to keep them.