How to Let Clients Select Photos Online
"Just send me the numbers of the ones you like" works for twenty photos. It falls apart at four hundred. Filenames don't match what the client sees, screenshots crop out the number, and you end up cross-referencing a WhatsApp message against a folder at 11pm.
Why the WhatsApp method breaks down
- Filenames aren't visible in previews. Clients send you a screenshot of the gallery grid, not the actual image number.
- There's no single source of truth. A partner picks separately, a parent adds a few more, and now you're merging three lists by hand.
- Selections get lost in the thread. Between "can you also do the reception ones" and rescheduling questions, the actual list scrolls out of view.
- It doesn't scale past a handful of clients. Manually cross-referencing selections is fine for one wedding a month — not for a full season.
What an online selection workflow actually needs
The core idea is simple: the client interacts directly with the same gallery you're looking at, and their choices update your side automatically.
- No login for the client. A link or QR code should be enough — anything requiring an account creates a drop-off point before they even see a photo.
- Selection happens in the gallery itself. A tap or click on the photo they want, not a separate form.
- You see the exact selection, not a description of it. The same photo IDs, updated live, with a running count.
- It works for multiple people picking from the same gallery. The couple, and sometimes a parent, all selecting from the same set without overwriting each other.
What this changes about your delivery timeline
Once selection is a tap instead of a message thread, the bottleneck moves to editing — which is arguably where it should be. You're no longer waiting on a client to compile a list, and you're not the one reconciling three different versions of it. The gallery link that delivers the photos becomes the same link that collects the selection.
Delivery and selection are two ends of the same booking. If the rest of that booking — the contract, the timeline, the client chat — is still scattered across separate tools, that's the bigger thing worth fixing. See how Slancio's pipeline connects the whole booking →