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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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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 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.

You can change the tier later. Switching an Open gallery to Watermarked re-processes the photos already in it with your watermark; until each one is done, it is left out of the gallery, and it comes back once it’s ready.

A photo or video appears in a public gallery, and can be bought, only once it has finished processing. Anything still processing, or that failed to process, is left out of the gallery and can’t be selected or paid for.

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.

Galleries organized into folders show visitors a tab per folder with a per-folder download button — the same experience as folders in a customer gallery. See Organizing with folders.

Section titled “Create and publish a gallery”
  1. Go to Public galleries 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. Open Manage media & packages on the gallery and choose Upload files, or import from Google Drive. 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. Storage and video limits on your plan still apply to gallery uploads.
  4. Pick a cover image (optional). In Manage media & packages, choose Set as cover on any photo; it’s marked Cover from then on. If you don’t pick one, the gallery uses its first photo automatically, so your Public galleries list shows your work rather than a placeholder.
  5. 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.

Public galleries aren’t limited by your plan’s active-shoot count, and you can publish as many as you want.

Link previews & search (OG / SEO)

Section titled “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. The preview image is the gallery’s cover, or its first photo if you haven’t picked a cover.
  • Search indexing — each gallery has an Allow search 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

Section titled “Privacy & anti-copy options”

Two protective toggles sit in the gallery’s Gallery look section (see Gallery look & templates for the rest of that section):

  • Hide file names — no names under photos or in the viewer. Clients who buy see the same numbered names (image-1, image-2 and so on) on their purchases page, on the files they download, and on their receipts.
  • Block 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.

Separately, the files you deliver have some metadata removed for every gallery and shoot: location and editing-software details are stripped by default, while camera, date and copyright details are kept unless you choose to strip them too. Change this under Settings → Media privacy (the section is titled Photo and video metadata).

Section titled “Restricting who can view a gallery”

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 for that browser session.
  • 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 search indexing setting, they won’t appear on Google. A link preview only shows the cover image if you chose one; it never uses a photo from inside the gallery.
  • Switching the restriction back off makes the gallery open to anyone with the link again (subject to your normal publish and indexing settings).
Section titled “How customers buy from a gallery”

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.

A first-time buyer creates their account from the gallery itself: they enter an email, get a sign-in link, and clicking it brings them back to the gallery they were buying from, signed in and ready to continue. Returning customers who already have a password sign in and go straight to checkout.

Once someone has bought an image, they see it without the watermark in the gallery from then on, and it also appears under Purchases in their account (on the Gallery downloads tab) — so the files stay reachable long after the checkout link expires. The Orders and receipts tab on that page lists every order they have paid for with this studio, with its receipt to view or email to themselves again, so a client who loses the receipt email no longer has to ask you for it.

Downloading a folder

Section titled “Downloading a folder”

On a gallery with folders, the Download this folder button saves every file in that folder the visitor is allowed to download, one after another. On a watermarked gallery that means only the images they’ve bought. If some files can’t be delivered, the page says how many were left out. Browsers sometimes ask permission to allow several downloads at once.

Billing note

Section titled “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

Section titled “What’s next”