What are Projects

Goal: understand what a Project is, what it groups together, and how to turn the feature on for your company and your clients.

What a Project is

A Project belongs to a single client and pulls together everything you're delivering to them for a job — its photo galleries, video collections, signed model releases, and any files you or the client upload. Instead of a client hunting through a long list of galleries and collections to find "the wedding" or "the product shoot," a Project gives that job one home page with everything linked together, plus a running conversation about it.

A client can have as many Projects as you like — one per shoot, one per season, however you organize your work.

A Project doesn't hold photos or videos itself. It links to galleries and collections you've already created (or create afterward) — nothing is moved or duplicated.

Off by default

Projects is a feature you switch on, not something that appears automatically. Until you enable it, there's no Projects link anywhere and nothing about your account changes.

The two switches

Both live on Settings → Client Portal, in the Projects card:

  • Enable Projects — turns the feature on for your company. This adds a Projects link to your admin sidebar, a Recent Projects row to your dashboard, and a Projects list on each client's own page.
  • Show Projects to clients — additionally adds Projects to the client portal, so your clients can see their own project pages too.
The client-visible switch only works when Projects is enabled for your company. If you turn Projects off entirely, client visibility is turned off with it automatically — you'll need to re-check it if you turn Projects back on later.

See Company settings for a walkthrough of the rest of that page.

What enabling adds

  • Your sidebar — a Projects link that opens a list of every project across all your clients, filterable by client and status.
  • Your dashboard — a Recent Projects row showing your latest projects at a glance.
  • Each client's page — a Projects section listing that client's projects, so you don't have to leave the client page to see what's in progress for them.

What clients see (when both switches are on)

A client with Projects visible gets their own My Projects item in their portal sidebar and dashboard. Opening a project shows them:

  • The Project Brief, if you've written one, at the top of their Overview tab.
  • Its published photo galleries and video collections — draft items stay invisible to them, exactly as elsewhere in the portal.
  • Any files shared on the project, both yours and their own uploads.
  • The project's updates and comments, so they can follow progress and reply.
  • An Ask Milo chat button, so they can ask questions about the project directly — see Ask Milo (project chat).

The AI overview and daily digest are written for your team and stay on your side of the project — they are not shown on the client's project page.

Clients never see model releases on a project, and anything about a release or an unpublished item is left out of what they see in the update feed. See What clients see for the client portal experience more broadly.

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