One of the most common things clients can ask for from photographers is providing photo galleries. This allows you to not only deliver a better customer experience but also to boost sales. Let’s see how picdrop can help you create the best galleries for your clients. Almost every photoshoot imaginable involves collaboration to some degree. This can range from working with a few dozen people to a single client for family photos. Naturally, being able to show and display your work to the client in a quick and easy way is a must for just about any photographer in 2024. In other words, collaboration from the shoot beginning to the very end is key in this industry.
picdrop is one of the ways you can improve the collaboration between you and the client. Providing a secure image and video-sharing solution for professional photographers, Picdrop can create online galleries that make selections easy for your team or client.
Why Use Dedicated Proof Galleries?
There are many ways you can share your images with the client. One of them would just be a simple file transfer of the images. While easy, this basically means that you are giving away images the client probably has not paid for. This is the least preferred method in my books. Another one would be to share these images in an online gallery of sorts. This can be done in a number of ways, some better than others. Having now tried a range of online proofing gallery software, the German product picdrop has caught my eye as the most versatile and optimal solution for sharing my work online. The reader who is familiar with my work might know that I often use online photo galleries to share content with my clientele. Having used a variety of software, picdrop has proven to be the most efficient and optimal, which led me to switch over.
Ultimate Control
As a photographer, I care a lot about how my images are seen over at the other end. I need something that is simple to navigate from both desktop and mobile, as well as packed with enough features to make life on my end easy. picdrop allows you to customize your gallery for the audience you have in mind.
Presentation Mode
To begin with there are two vastly different modes for you to pick from. Presentation mode and edit mode. Presentation mode will present the images in a very simple layout that is best suited for the end client. Such a client might be a family or someone looking to get their headshots. This mode has a nicer layout, but the controls are not as obvious. 
Edit Mode
The second mode, and my favourite mode is the edit mode. It displays much more information when compared to the presentation mode. This is the mode I use to deliver images to my clients, who are perhaps more familiar with the photography industry. 
The advantages of this mode are that it has a lot of organization features which make selections much clearer and faster to get through.
Of course, no matter the mode you pick, there are tons of options on how to present your general layout. You can set header images, and rename, and organize the galleries in a way that is convenient both for you and for your client.
Rankings, Selections, Feedback
No matter the way your client is selecting the images, they will inevitably use some sort of ranking system for it. As such, when I select myself, I use a star system. picdrop uses a flag system of red, orange, green, and final. This allows users to quickly establish a clear way of letting the photographer know the images they need. On your end, you are able to group the images by the flag set by your client. This is a very convenient way to see the images you will be delivering.
picdrop has more features that allow your client to give easy and effective feedback. As such, the clients are able to give feedback in comment form as well as in scribble form. If you’re anything like me, you will be more than familiar with someone screenshotting a preview, and then scribbling on it in the default app on their phone. Besides being tedious to do for more than a few photos, this is also a super slow and ineffective way of getting visual feedback. After all, nobody is born perfect, and some people appreciate the ability to be slightly better after Photoshop.
From my point of view as a photographer, I also care about things such as upload times, privacy, as well as being able to export the selections back into my editing software. When it comes to upload times, picdrop was faster from my experience, assuming the same internet connection. Sure, you need to export your images, however, that doesn’t take much if you are simply exporting web-res previews. My experience has been quite positive, as previews alone don’t take up much space or take too long to export. Additionally, once the client has made their selection, you can filter the images they selected, and export the selection with a simple copy/paste action. It is as simple as pasting the filenames into your editing software from picdrop. Lastly, picdrop has plenty of privacy controls at your fingertips. 
Lastly, the functionality that made me pick picdrop over other software is the ability to vote on the images. Whenever I need to send off the images to several people to select, I can simply enable voting, where the team can like the images they need to use. The ones with the most likes are the ones the team agrees on and are the ones I will be editing. Previously, this would have to be done by sitting down with the client for a meeting and spending several hours trying to figure out what is it that everyone likes. Additionally, because picdrop is not synced to my software automatically, I can be in control of my internal selections.
Closing Thoughts
I have now completely switched to picdrop for showing images to my team and clients. The versatility of the platform allows me to focus on what’s important and allows clients to select the images they need in a new and much easier way. After all, it is my job to have the necessary tools to make the client’s life easier. I really look forward to using picdrop more, and strongly encourage you to try it.
