Downloads & zipping
Goal: understand how you and your clients download photos from a gallery, one at a time or all at once.
Prerequisites
- Downloads must be enabled on the gallery — see Right-click & downloads. If Disable downloads is on, download buttons don't appear for viewers at all (this doesn't affect your own admin access).
Downloading a single photo
In the gallery preview or the public gallery view, each photo shows a small download button when downloads are enabled. Clicking it downloads just that one file — the original, or the watermarked version if the gallery has an active watermark.
Downloading the whole gallery
- Open the gallery and click Download All near the top of the page.
- A full-screen overlay appears with a spinner: "Preparing your download… This can take a moment for large galleries."
- The server builds a zip file containing every photo, then your browser starts the file download and the overlay disappears automatically.
The zip is built on request, while you wait — it is not pre-built or emailed to
you afterward. For a gallery with a lot of large photos this can take noticeably longer than a single
download, which is exactly what the "this can take a moment" message is warning you about.
If your company has uploaded a photo licence or marketing file, those are automatically included in every gallery zip alongside the photos.
When a gallery has an active watermark, the zip download
contains the watermarked versions of each photo, not the untouched originals.