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Public galleries & portfolio

A public gallery is a link-shareable showcase of your work that anyone can open — no login, no invite. Use it as a portfolio for your Instagram bio, your website, or a social post, and let visitors buy and download images right from the page.

This is different from a normal shoot, which sits behind a customer login and a private invite (see Customer access tiers). A public gallery is meant to be found and shared — though you can also lock one behind a password or private link when you want to share it with only certain people (see Restricting who can view a gallery).

How public galleries work

Each gallery has its own web address:

https://yourstudio.deliver.tobren.io/p/your-gallery-slug

If you’ve set up a custom domain, the gallery is served from that instead. You choose the slug (the part after /p/), so you can make it readable — /p/spring-minis, /p/2026-portfolio, and so on.

You can have as many public galleries as you like, each with its own title, cover image, description, and set of photos.

Choosing an access tier

When you create a gallery you pick one of two tiers — this controls what a visitor gets:

  • Watermarked (default) — visitors browse watermarked previews. To download the full-resolution file they sign up or sign in and buy the image (or a package). This is the tier to use for selling prints and digital files.
  • Open — visitors get the full-resolution files directly, with no purchase and no sign-in. Use this for a true portfolio where you want people to take and share the images.

For a watermarked gallery you set prices two ways (you can mix them):

  • A per-image price for à-la-carte buying, and/or
  • A package (a fixed price for a set of images) attached to the gallery. See packages in Delivering a shoot.

An image with no individual price is package-only — it can be bought as part of a package but not on its own.

  1. Go to Portfolio in your admin sidebar and click New gallery.
  2. Give it a title and a slug, choose the access tier, and (for watermarked galleries) set pricing.
  3. Add photos. Uploading to a gallery uses the same pipeline as a shoot, so watermarked galleries are processed automatically — give large uploads a few minutes before previews are ready. You can also set a display order and a cover image.
  4. Toggle Publish when you’re ready. Until a gallery is published its link won’t load for visitors.

You can edit, reorder, re-price, or unpublish a gallery at any time.

Link previews & search (OG / SEO)

Published galleries are built to look good when shared:

  • Link previews — paste a gallery link into Instagram, Facebook, iMessage, LinkedIn, etc. and a preview card renders with your title and a cover image. You can set a specific preview image per gallery, otherwise the cover (or first photo) is used.
  • Search indexing — each gallery has an Allow indexing option (on by default). Leave it on to let Google and other search engines list the gallery; turn it off for a gallery you only want to share by direct link. (A restricted gallery is never indexed, whatever this option says.)

Privacy & anti-copy options

Each gallery has a few protective toggles:

  • Hide filenames — visitors see generic names like image-3.jpg instead of your originals.
  • Hide camera info (EXIF) — preview images never carry your camera metadata.
  • Disable right-click — discourages casual “save image as.” Treat this as a deterrent, not true protection — the real protection is that watermarked visitors only ever receive watermarked previews until they buy.

By default a published gallery is open to anyone who has the link. When you want to share work with only certain people — a client preview, a private event, proofs you’re not ready to make public — turn on Restrict viewing (password / private link) in the gallery’s settings.

A restricted gallery is gated two ways, and either one lets a visitor in:

  • A view password you set (minimum 6 characters). Share it however you like; a visitor types it once and the gallery stays unlocked in their browser.
  • A private link — a shareable URL with a secret key built in (/p/your-slug?key=…). Anyone who opens it is let straight through, no password needed. Copy it from the gallery’s settings. If the link leaks or you want to cut off access, click Rotate link — the current link stops working immediately and a fresh one is generated.

Use either method or both; a visitor only needs one of them.

A few things worth knowing:

  • Viewing and buying are separate. Unlocking a gallery (password or link) only lets someone see it. On a watermarked gallery, buying and downloading full-resolution files still requires the customer to sign in with their email, exactly as on an open gallery.
  • Restricted galleries are never search-indexed — regardless of the Allow indexing setting, they won’t appear on Google and won’t render a public link-preview card.
  • Switching the restriction back off makes the gallery open to anyone with the link again (subject to your normal publish and indexing settings).

On a watermarked gallery, a visitor taps Buy on an image or selects a package, then creates an account (or signs in) and pays. Payment goes directly to your own Stripe or Square account — Tobren never takes a cut (see Payment setup). As soon as the payment clears, the full-resolution downloads unlock for that customer.

Downloading on iPhone & iPad

When a customer downloads several images at once on iOS, the device’s native share sheet opens so they can save everything to Photos or Files in one go. A couple of tips worth passing along:

  • They should start the download and wait for the share sheet to appear rather than tapping away — on iOS a large batch takes a few seconds to prepare, and switching apps mid-prepare can cancel it.
  • This is normal iOS behavior, not an error.

Billing note

Downloads from a public gallery — both watermarked previews and purchased originals — count toward your account’s egress like any other download. See Pricing & overages for how egress is measured and billed.

What’s next