I shot a friend's wedding last year. The photos turned out well, but delivering
them ended up being a whole separate problem.
They wanted the photos available for friends and family to browse, but not for
the whole internet. Reasonable ask. My options at the time were Google Drive
(ugly square thumbnails, slow previews), Google Photos (forces everyone to sign
into Google and "accept" the album into their account), or just... a zip file
over email. None of these felt right for someone's wedding photos.
And so I ended up building a one-off password-protected page as part of their
wedding website. It worked, but I was rushing to get it done alongside
everything else, and the result wasn't up to my own standards. That's when the
thought stuck with me: why doesn't a proper solution for this already exist?
The gap
I looked around. Dedicated gallery delivery platforms do exist, but they
bothered me in two ways.
First, the pricing. Google gives you 15GB for free. Cloud storage is cheap. Yet
photographer-specific platforms charge a steep markup for what is, at the end of
the day, hosting images. High-quality photos take up a lot of space, and the
markup just didn't feel fair.
Second, the workflow. Most of these services wanted me to fill out pages of
forms and questionnaires before I could even upload a single photo. In my head,