Gallery expiry & retention

Every shoot in Tobren Deliver has an expiry — the date its media comes offline. You control it, and you can turn it off entirely.

Out of the box, a new shoot expires 14 days after you create it. The clock starts at creation, not at publish and not at your customer’s first visit — so if you spend three days uploading, your customer sees the gallery for the remaining eleven. Most studios change this once, at the workspace level, and never think about it again.

Set it once for your whole workspace

Settings → Shoot Expiry

Tick Override platform default for this workspace, then choose:

Never expire — shoots stay online until you delete them yourself.
Expire after N days — new shoots come offline N days after creation.

Common choices:

You want	Choose
Keep everything until I delete it myself	Never expire
A season, for event and sports work	Expire after 120 days
A year, typical for weddings and portraits	Expire after 365 days
A short delivery window	Expire after 14–30 days

This sets the default for new shoots only. Changing it does not re-date shoots that already exist — a shoot’s expiry date is stamped when the shoot is created. To rescue a shoot that is expiring soon, open that shoot and change its own expiry (below); changing the workspace default will not do it.

Override it on any single shoot

The workspace default is a starting value, not a rule. Every shoot has its own Expiry control in the shoot form — either a Never expires tick box or an explicit date. So a single archive job can stay online forever inside a workspace that otherwise clears itself out, and one quick-turnaround delivery can expire next week inside a workspace that otherwise keeps everything.

The shoot list shows an expiry badge on each card — a grey pill with the date, turning amber inside the last week and red once it has passed — so nothing expires out of sight.

Nobody is surprised by an expiry

While Send expiration warning emails is on (it is by default), Tobren Deliver emails, starting 7 days before a shoot expires and daily until it does:

You — one digest per day to the workspace admin, listing every shoot expiring in the next 7 days.
Your customers — every customer assigned to the expiring shoot, whether or not they have ever logged in, unless they have unsubscribed from that shoot’s emails.

A shoot with no customers assigned to it still generates your admin digest. Turning the setting off silences both the admin digest and the customer notices; it does not stop the expiry itself.

What happens when a shoot expires

	Shoot with purchases	Shoot with no purchases
Media files	removed from storage	removed from storage
Shoot record	retained, listed under Archived Shoots	removed
Order and payment records	retained	retained
Archive PDF	generated and kept	not generated
Recoverable afterwards	files no — record and archive PDF yes	no — this is permanent

A prepaid shoot that still had media at expiry is treated the same way as a shoot with purchases: it is archived rather than removed.

The archive PDF is your paper trail: shoot details, revenue, the customer list, and a thumbnail grid showing who bought what. Find it under Archived Shoots at the bottom of the shoots page, where every archived shoot keeps a PDF download button.

There is no restore. An expiry deletes the media files from storage permanently — an archived shoot keeps its record and its PDF, but not its photos. Your order and payment history is never removed by an expiry, so your books stay intact regardless of how you set this.

Storage and your bill

Keeping shoots online keeps their files in storage, and storage counts toward your plan’s allowance. If you choose Never expire, plan for your library to grow — see Pricing & overages for allowances and overage rates.

Expiry is the tidiest way to keep storage flat without deleting anything by hand, which matters most on the Free plan: Free can set Never expire like any other plan, but its 3 GB storage allowance is a hard cap rather than a metered overage. When a Free workspace fills up, new uploads are blocked — your existing photos are never deleted to make room. A retention window is what keeps that from happening.