Do galleries expire? How the Client Vault works

This page is for photographers wondering what happens to a gallery after the job is done. If you’ve come from a platform where galleries expire after a set time, start here. By the end you’ll know how long a Tellisto gallery stays live, what the Client Vault is, and how it earns you money on work you’ve already delivered.

Your galleries don’t expire

Most gallery platforms put your delivered work on a timer. After thirty days, ninety days or a year, the link dies or the gallery is archived unless someone pays to keep it. Tellisto doesn’t do that. Galleries don’t time out when nobody visits, and nothing archives in the background. A gallery stays live for as long as you keep it, and only you decide when it comes down.

The free plan limits how much you store, not how long you store it. You get 20 GB of storage and two live galleries at a time. Those numbers cap how much is published at once, never how long a gallery stays up. A gallery you delivered a year ago is still live today, on any plan, for as long as you leave it up.

The storage problem that keeps growing

Galleries that don’t expire solve the client’s short-term worry. They don’t solve yours. Every job you deliver is finished work you’re now responsible for, sitting on your storage or your drives, and that pile only grows. You end up storing every shoot you’ve ever done, unpaid.

The usual industry answer is an expiry date, so the client feels pressure to download or pay. That helps nobody. Clients lose photos years later when a link they forgot about stops working. You’re left answering the “can you resend our wedding gallery” email long after the job was paid for. The Vault handles this without the pressure.

The keepsake: your client keeps their own photos

When you deliver a gallery, you can offer to keep it for your client long term. That offer is the keepsake. It’s priced by the size of the gallery, from $10 a year for a small one and a bit more for a larger one, renewed each year. Your client sees it labelled by size (a “Gallery keepsake, 30 GB”, for instance), so the price matches what they can see.

The client pays for it, because it’s their wedding, their newborn shoot, their family. It’s their own way to keep the photos long term, not a promise from us that any gallery stays online indefinitely. You make the offer as part of your delivery, and the client decides whether to take it. How you word the delivery affects how the offer comes across, and what to write when you send a gallery has more on that.

What the Vault does for you

It does two things for you.

First, on every plan, a vaulted gallery stops counting against your storage. Once a client keeps their gallery, those gigabytes come off your allowance. A paid-for keepsake never forces you to delete anything to make room, which is the opposite of what an expiry date does.

Second, on Pro you earn a share of every keepsake your clients keep. The share is recurring, not a one-off, so a gallery you delivered a while back can still be paying you. Your billing page shows what you’ve earned and what’s coming next, and you get an email each time a client keeps a gallery. On the free plan you still get the storage back, but not the revenue share. If Vault income matters to you, look at the pricing and Pro.

The offer appears in your studio’s name, so it should feel like something you’d send. It reads as part of your delivery rather than a sales pitch. There are no pop-ups and no countdowns, and no pressure on the people you photographed.

The protections that make it safe to offer

Two guarantees back the keepsake, so you can offer it without worry.

You can’t archive a gallery with an active paid keepsake. Once the client has paid to keep it, you can’t take away those photos by accident. That protects the client, and it’s why they can trust the offer.

A client who changes their mind is also covered. A Vault client gets a refund link in their receipt email, carrying your branding rather than ours, and can cancel within 30 days. If a keepsake is refunded, your revenue share on it is reversed, which is fair on all sides.

In short: your galleries stay live as long as you keep them, and the Vault makes long-term storage the client’s choice instead of your cost. On Pro it also pays you for work you already finished. If you’re weighing up the money side of moving across, switching to Tellisto covers how the plans fit your business. The client questions page has ready answers for anything your clients ask about keeping their photos.