Wedding gallery expiration policy: how long to keep galleries online

Yes, set an expiry date on wedding galleries, and make the window long enough that no couple feels pushed: 12 months from delivery is the most common policy, 6 months is the short end, and a minority of photographers keep galleries online indefinitely as a selling point. The number matters less than how it is communicated. The couple should hear it 3 times, in the contract, in the delivery email, and in a warning 30 days before the date. Expiry is not there to punish slow downloaders. It puts a deadline on the download, which is the only thing that reliably gets couples to do it, and it keeps your storage bill tied to active work rather than every wedding you have ever shot.

3 policies compared

Policy	What it gets you	What it costs you	Suits
Never expire	A marketing promise; no reminder emails; no re-host requests	Storage grows every year; you pay to host weddings from 2019; if you close the studio, every gallery goes with it	Low volume, or a storage plan big enough that it does not matter
Expire at 12 months	Predictable storage; a deadline that drives downloads; covers the first anniversary	Some couples miss it and ask for a re-upload; you need 2 warning emails	Most wedding photographers
Expire at 3 to 6 months	The smallest storage bill	Feels short to couples; more re-host requests; a honeymoon and a house move can eat 3 months	High-volume studios, or web-size-only delivery

Typical windows

As rules of thumb:

• 12 months from delivery is the default. It covers the first anniversary, which is when many couples finally order prints or an album.
• 6 months works if you deliver web-size files online and the couple has already received a USB or a high-resolution set.
• Anything under 90 days creates more email than it saves in storage.
• Count from delivery, not the wedding date. A gallery delivered 8 weeks after the wedding with a 12-month expiry from the wedding date is online for 10 months, and the couple will notice.

If you sell hosting as a premium, do it as an add-on (“lifetime hosting” at a fixed price) rather than making everyone’s gallery permanent. The couples who value it pay for it, and the rest have a date.

How to word it

In the contract:

Your online gallery will remain available for 12 months from the date of delivery. Please download your full-resolution photos within that time. After 12 months the gallery is removed; re-hosting is available for a fee.

In the delivery email, one line near the download instructions:

Your gallery is online until [date]. Download the full-resolution files before then and keep a copy in 2 places.

30 days before expiry:

Your gallery closes on [date]. If you have not downloaded the full-resolution photos yet, use the download button and PIN [PIN]. Reply if you need help.

7 days before, the same note, shorter. Then close it on the date. If you extend it silently for everyone, the deadline stops meaning anything and the next reminder is ignored.

Gallery delivery email templates has the full delivery email with the expiry line in place.

Archive and re-hosting fees

Couples will ask for a gallery back: a lost laptop, a house fire, a parent who never downloaded. Decide the fee before the first request:

• Re-upload fee. A flat fee for putting the gallery back online for 30 to 90 days. Many photographers price this in the range of a small print order, as a rule of thumb, enough to cover an hour of your time and to make the deadline real.
• Extended hosting. A yearly fee to keep the gallery live past the standard window. Sell it at delivery, when the couple cares most.
• USB or drive. A physical copy at a fixed price, sent after expiry or at delivery. Some photographers include one in the package and use it as the reason the gallery can expire at all.

Whatever the fee, keep the archive. A couple asking 6 years later for the photos of a parent who has since died is not a customer-service problem; it is the reason you kept the files. Waive the fee when the reason is that one.

What to do with the storage

Expiry only helps your storage bill if the photos actually leave your hosting. There are 2 states a gallery can be in after the date:

1. Unpublished. The link stops working but the photos stay on your hosting. Nothing is saved.
2. Deleted from hosting. The storage is freed. Your own archive on drives is the copy of record.

Choose the second, on a schedule: once a quarter, delete galleries that expired more than 30 days ago and whose files you have confirmed on 2 drives. Backup strategy for wedding photographers covers what “confirmed” means.

The math makes the case. At 8 GB per wedding and 30 weddings a year, you add about 240 GB of hosted photos a year. Without expiry, a photographer 5 years in is hosting more than a terabyte of galleries almost nobody opens. With a 12-month expiry and quarterly deletion, hosted storage stays around 250 to 300 GB. How much storage wedding galleries take runs the numbers for different delivery sizes.

On FOCL Galleries, storage is the only metered thing, plans run from 3 GB free to 2 TB, and downloads and bandwidth are never capped, which is what makes a hard expiry date fair to the couple. The expiry date is set per gallery in its privacy settings; the help center covers it under privacy settings.

When not to expire

Skip expiry if your volume is under about 10 weddings a year and your storage plan has room for a decade of it, or if permanent hosting is part of how you sell. A photographer who charges a premium and promises “your gallery, forever” should mean it, and should budget for it in the price. What does not work is promising forever and quietly deleting galleries in year 3.

The download is the point

Every part of an expiry policy exists to get the couple to download the full-resolution files while they still can. If your galleries expire and couples still have not downloaded, the policy is fine and the emails are the problem. How to get couples to download their gallery fixes that.