Passwords, guest links and who sees which photos

Every client gallery makes the same trade: a link that is easy to open is easy to forward. Most photographers never decide where they want to sit on that line, and then get surprised by it in one of two directions — a private gallery circulating further than intended, or a client locked out of their own photographs on a Sunday.

The decision is small once it is broken down.

What a gallery link is, exactly

An unlisted gallery link is a secret address. It is not indexed, it is not guessable in any practical sense, and anyone holding it can open the gallery. That is the whole security model, and it is the same model as an unlisted video or a shared cloud folder.

Which makes it a key. It is fine to hand a key to a couple. It is worth thinking about before handing one to a group chat of ninety guests, because at that point the address is effectively public and you should assume it will not come back.

Three levels, and when each is right

Open link, no password

Best for: engagement sessions, commercial work meant to be shared, anything the client will forward anyway. The gallery opens in one tap, which materially increases the number of clients who actually look at it.

Not for: anything a client would be upset to find circulating. A wedding usually includes photographs taken in a bedroom in the morning, and those are not for the guest list.

One password for the whole gallery

Best for: the default wedding delivery. The couple get the address and one password; they can pass both to family as they see fit. It stops casual forwarding without making them ask you for anything.

Choose something they can type on a phone. A wedding date, a venue, two words. A 16-character random string means a support message, not security — they will paste it into the group chat next to the link and you have gained nothing.

A separate link per group

This is the one most photographers do not know exists and most need. Instead of one door, the gallery has several, each with its own address, its own password and its own subset of the photographs.

Concretely:

• The couple get a link to all eight hundred frames.
• The bride's family get a link showing the ninety they appear in.
• The groom's family get theirs.
• The venue or florist get the twelve wide shots they asked for, and nothing else.

Two things this fixes at once. The aunt who wants four photographs is not scrolling past the entire wedding to find them, which is a real usability problem and the reason many family members simply never download anything. And you have not exported, uploaded and maintained four separate galleries to achieve it — it is one gallery with four scopes.

Set an expiry, or deliberately do not

An expiry date closes a gallery on a day you choose. It is genuinely useful for commercial work with a licence period, and for anything you would rather not still be open in three years.

For a wedding, the honest answer is usually to leave it open and tell the couple to download their files anyway. An expiry that arrives before the client got round to downloading is the single most common delivery failure there is, and it is entirely self-inflicted.

What to tell the client

Three sentences in the handover message prevent most access problems:

1. Here is the link and the password.
2. You can share both with your family — or tell me who needs their own link and I will make one.
3. Please download everything and keep your own copy, whatever else you do.

One limitation to know about

On most platforms, including this one, the individual image addresses inside a gallery are signed and time-limited rather than checked against your password on every request. It is what makes a gallery load quickly from a cache near the client.

The consequence is worth understanding: an image address that has already been handed to a browser keeps working for a while — for Sowarly, up to 24 hours — even after you unpublish the gallery. Unpublishing stops new addresses being issued; it cannot recall ones already out. If you need a hard, immediate cut-off, ask your provider rather than assuming unpublishing achieved it. Ours is described in the privacy policy.

A rule of thumb

Password everything by default. Use per-group links whenever you know a group only wants its own photographs, which at a wedding is always. Set an expiry only when there is a reason, and tell the client to keep their own copy every single time.