How much storage do wedding galleries take?

A full-resolution JPEG wedding gallery of 600 to 800 photos usually takes 1.5 to 4 GB. About 2 GB per wedding is the planning number we use at FOCL, and it is a rule of thumb, not a measurement of your work. Video adds much more per file: a 4-minute highlight film is 1 to 3 GB, a full ceremony edit 5 to 15 GB, and about 2 GB per video is a fair planning average if you deliver mostly highlight films. A photographer delivering 25 weddings a year, photos only, adds roughly 50 GB a year; with a highlight film in each gallery, roughly 100 GB.

Measure your own first. Open the folder from your last three deliveries, note the size, and divide by the photo count. That number is better than this page.

What decides the size of a photo gallery

Four things, in order of how much they matter:

1. Photo count. The obvious one. 500 photos at 3 MB is 1.5 GB; 1,000 is 3 GB. What to deliver is its own decision, covered in how many photos to deliver for a wedding.
2. Sensor resolution. More pixels, bigger files. A 45-megapixel body produces JPEGs about twice the size of a 24-megapixel body at the same quality setting.
3. JPEG quality on export. Quality 100 in most editors produces files 2 to 3 times larger than quality 80, with no difference a client will see on a screen or a print. Quality 80 to 85 is a common rule of thumb for delivery.
4. Content. Detail and texture compress badly; smooth skies and dark reception frames compress well. Ceremony photos in a forest are bigger than the same count of dance floor photos.

Typical full-resolution file sizes at quality 80 to 85, as rules of thumb:

Camera	Per JPEG	700-photo gallery
20 to 24 megapixels	2.5 to 5 MB	1.8 to 3.5 GB
30 to 33 megapixels	4 to 7 MB	2.8 to 4.9 GB
45 to 50 megapixels	6 to 12 MB	4.2 to 8.4 GB
61 megapixels	8 to 15 MB	5.6 to 10.5 GB

At quality 100, roughly double every figure in the table. A 45-megapixel body with quality-100 exports and a 1,000-photo gallery can reach 20 GB, which is where per-gallery limits on hosting platforms start to matter.

Sneak peeks and a separate engagement session gallery add to the total. An engagement session of 80 to 120 photos is 0.3 to 0.6 GB as a rule of thumb.

What video adds

Video size is arithmetic: bitrate times length. In gigabytes, that is megabits per second, times seconds, divided by 8,000.

Deliverable	Length	Bitrate	Size
Highlight film, 1080p	4 min	20 Mbps	0.6 GB
Highlight film, 4K	4 min	50 Mbps	1.5 GB
Feature film, 4K	15 min	50 Mbps	5.6 GB
Full ceremony, 1080p	40 min	20 Mbps	6 GB
Full ceremony, 4K	40 min	50 Mbps	15 GB
Toasts, 1080p	25 min	20 Mbps	3.8 GB

A gallery with a 4K highlight film and a 4K ceremony edit carries 16 to 17 GB of video next to 2 to 4 GB of photos. That is why gallery platforms treat video differently from photos, and why it is worth being clear what a “video” in your storage estimate means. The 2 GB per video planning figure holds for highlight and feature films; a full ceremony or a full reception is a multiple of that.

Export settings matter more here than anywhere else. A videographer’s ProRes master runs to hundreds of megabits per second and is not a delivery file. Ask for an H.264 or H.265 MP4 at a delivery bitrate. In FOCL Galleries, video is measured in hours per plan (3 on Essentials, 10 on Studio, 30 on Pro), files can be up to 30 GB each, and they stream adaptively, with the original or a 1080p version available to download; files above about 200 Mbps cannot be processed, so the delivery export is needed anyway. The practical side of putting films next to photos is in delivering wedding video alongside photos.

Estimating a year

Multiply what you deliver by how many you deliver, then by how long it stays online. The third factor is the one most photographers forget: storage is not what you upload this year, it is everything still online.

Weddings a year	Photos only, per year	With one highlight film each	With a highlight film and a ceremony edit each
15	30 GB	60 GB	195 GB
25	50 GB	100 GB	325 GB
40	80 GB	160 GB	520 GB

Those use 2 GB of photos, 2 GB for a highlight film and 9 GB for a ceremony edit. Add engagement sessions at 0.5 GB each.

Then multiply by years online. Keep galleries up for 1 year and the table is your steady state. Keep them up for 3 years and triple it. Keep them up forever and it grows by that row every year. How long to keep them is a policy question, and the trade-offs are in wedding gallery expiration policy.

For reference against our own plans: FOCL Galleries is 3 GB free (photos only), 100 GB on Essentials at $10 a month, 500 GB on Studio at $19 a month, and 2 TB on Pro at $39 a month, with 25 GB of photos per gallery, 50 MB per photo, and no cap on downloads or bandwidth. At 2 GB a wedding, the free plan holds about one wedding gallery at a time. A 25-wedding photographer keeping 2 years of photo galleries online is at about 100 GB. The same photographer adding two videos per wedding needs the 500 GB plan by the end of the first year. The full plan detail is in plans and storage.

Keeping the number down

Each of these has a cost, so choose deliberately.

• Export at quality 80 to 85, not 100. Halves the gallery. The cost is nothing a client will notice; the risk is a very large print from a heavily cropped frame, where the difference is still small.
• Do not upload two versions of the same frame. A color and a black-and-white version of 100 photos is 100 extra files. If you deliver both, that is a real choice, but count it.
• Take old galleries down on a schedule. The largest lever there is. Tell couples the date in the delivery email and remind them once before.
• Upload the delivery bitrate for video, not the master. A 4K highlight at 50 Mbps looks the same on a phone as one at 150 Mbps and is a third of the size.
• Deliver 1080p for long-form video. A full ceremony at 1080p is 40 percent of the 4K size and is watched on a laptop or a TV where the difference is slight. Keep the 4K highlight film, which is the one people re-watch.
• Do not upload RAW. FOCL Galleries does not accept it, and on any platform a RAW file is 5 to 10 times the size of its JPEG as a rule of thumb.

Web-size-only galleries at 2048 px would be a tenth of the size, but a couple who cannot download a full-resolution file for a print has not been delivered their wedding. Keep full resolution online, and control what guests download with the download settings instead.

Storage is not bandwidth

A 2 GB gallery viewed by 200 guests and downloaded by 30 of them moves 60 to 100 GB of data in a month. Some platforms meter that separately or cap downloads by plan; others count only what is stored. When comparing plans, check which one you are being charged for. The storage number on this page is the amount sitting on the server, not the amount moving off it. Your own backups are a separate question again, covered in backup strategy for wedding photographers.