How much photo storage do you actually need?
The honest answer is that it depends on what you shoot, not on a number on a pricing page. Here is a plain guide to what fills up a gallery, what your clients downloading never costs you, and how to size your plan without overpaying.
Storage is one of those numbers that looks scary on a pricing page and turns out to be simple once you know what it measures. It does not measure how many clients you have or how many galleries you send. It measures the size of the files you are keeping online right now. So the real question is not how big is the number, it is what am I actually storing.
What actually takes up space
There are two kinds of file in a client gallery, and they are wildly different sizes. The previews your clients scroll through are deliberately small, a watermarked version at screen resolution, so a whole gallery of them is light. The weight is in the originals: the full-resolution JPEGs you deliver, and the RAW files if you keep those online too. A single RAW frame can be 30 to 60 megabytes on its own. Multiply that by a full shoot and you see where the gigabytes go.
A rough guide by shoot
Every photographer's files are a little different, so treat these as ballpark figures rather than promises. They are meant to help you picture it, not to bill you.
- A short portrait or family session, delivered as edited JPEGs: usually well under a gigabyte.
- A longer session or a small event: a couple of gigabytes is common.
- A wedding delivered as full-resolution JPEGs: often 10 to 30 GB.
- The same wedding if you also keep the RAW files online: it can climb past 40 GB on its own.
Downloads are free, which changes the maths
A lot of older galleries charge you, or throttle you, based on how much your clients download. Ours does not. The storage runs on infrastructure with no egress fee, which is the technical way of saying that a client downloading their full gallery five times costs the same as never opening it. You pay for the space the files take up, full stop. That is why we can say unlimited downloads and mean it, and it is why you can size your plan around what you store rather than around how popular a gallery gets.
What each plan includes
Client galleries are available as an add-on, and included on the top plan. The storage that comes with each plan steps up as you grow: 5 GB on the entry plan, 50 GB on Studio, 250 GB on Pro, and a full terabyte on the top plan. When a single big job would push you over, you do not have to jump a whole tier. You can add a 25 GB pack for a few dollars a month, stack as many as you need, and drop them again later.
Keeping it tidy
The cap is about what is live, not about everything you have ever shot. A healthy rhythm is to deliver a gallery, give the client a generous window to download, and then archive or remove the finished one to your own backup. Your originals belong in your own long-term storage anyway. The online gallery is for delivering and selling, not for being your only copy. Work that way and a mid plan stretches a long way.
So pick the plan that fits the jobs you have on at once, not the entire back catalogue of your career. You can always add a pack the week a wedding lands, and let it go the week after you deliver.
