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

  1. Open the gallery and click Download All near the top of the page.
  2. A full-screen overlay appears with a spinner and a rotating status message. Once the server starts pulling photos together, a progress bar fills in with a live D / N photos count, then switches to a "packaging" state while the zip itself is assembled.
  3. 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 — for a gallery with a lot of large photos this can take noticeably longer than a single download. Keep the tab open until it starts; navigating away or closing the tab cancels the build.

Very large galleries: email delivery instead

If a gallery's total download size is over 4 GB, the Download All button changes to show that size (e.g. "Download All (5.2 GB)") and works differently: instead of building the zip while you wait in the browser, it's built in the background and a link to it is emailed to you once it's ready — you'll see a message confirming this and can safely close the page. This avoids very large downloads timing out in the browser.

The emailed download link stays valid for a limited number of days before it expires — request a fresh one from the gallery if you miss the window. This large-gallery flow applies the same way to a public shortlink visitor downloading a large gallery, except they're asked for an email address to send the link to first.

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.

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