Build, curate & share a Showcase

Goal: create a Showcase, add photos and videos to it from a client's existing galleries and collections, arrange them, and share the public link.

Prerequisites

  • Showcases turned on for your company — Settings → Features → Enable Showcases. See What are Showcases for the full switch walkthrough.
  • A client with at least one photo already uploaded to a gallery or one video already uploaded to a collection — a Showcase only pulls from media that already exists.

Creating a Showcase

From your admin sidebar's Showcases list, click New Showcase and fill in:

  1. Showcase Name and an optional Description (for your own reference — visitors don't see the description).
  2. Client — which client this Showcase is for. This can't be changed later; the item picker is scoped to this client's own galleries and collections.
  3. An optional Cover message shown on the Showcase's cover, and Show cover image to toggle a hero banner on or off.
  4. An optional Cover image upload — JPEG, PNG, GIF, or WebP, up to 10 MB — or, once the Showcase has photos in it, pick one of those photos as the cover instead. An uploaded image always takes precedence over a picked photo. The photo picker only appears on Edit, once you've added at least one photo.
  5. Allow downloads and Disable right-click — see Downloads & protection below.
  6. An optional Password and a Link expiry (7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days, or no expiry).

Saving takes you straight to the curation screen — a new Showcase starts as a draft and isn't visible at its public link until you publish it.

Clients with My Showcases turned on can create their own from the client portal, using the same fields minus the client picker (it's automatically their own account). See What are Showcases for the two switches that control this.

Curating: adding photos & videos

Opening a Showcase (from the list, or right after creating one) lands you on the curation screen, split into the current Items in this showcase tray and an Add photos & videos picker below it.

  1. In the picker, expand a Photos or Videos panel to see that client's galleries or collections, each opening into a thumbnail grid with checkboxes.
  2. Check the photos and/or videos you want, from as many of that client's galleries and collections as you like — a Showcase can mix items from several sources. Click Select all photos or Select all videos at the top of either panel to check everything available at once, instead of opening each gallery or collection individually.
  3. Click Add selected. The button shows a running count of your current selection, and appears both above the picker and again below it, so you don't have to scroll back up after selecting from a long list.

Items already in the Showcase show their checkbox pre-checked and disabled in the picker, so you can't add the same photo or video twice — "Select all" skips them too.

Curating: ordering & removing items

Every added item appears as a row in the tray, in the order visitors will see it:

  • Drag a row by its handle to reorder it. The new order saves automatically.
  • Each row has its own Downloadable checkbox — untick it to hide the download button for that one item without affecting the rest of the Showcase.
  • Click Remove on a row to take that item out of the Showcase. This doesn't touch the original photo or video — it stays exactly where it was in its gallery or collection.
If a photo or video is later deleted from its source gallery or collection, it quietly disappears from every Showcase it was part of — there's no broken link or error, just one fewer item.

Downloads & protection

Two levels control whether a visitor can download something from a Showcase, and both must allow it:

  • The Showcase's own Allow downloads switch (in its edit form) — the master switch for the whole Showcase.
  • Each item's own Downloadable checkbox, in the curation tray — lets you make individual photos or videos view-only even while downloads are on for the rest.

A video also still respects its source collection's own downloads setting — see Publish & downloads — on top of both Showcase-level checks.

Disable right-click discourages casual saving of media directly from the public page, the same as the equivalent setting on galleries and video collections.

Download All

When at least one item is downloadable under the rules above, visitors also see a Download All button that packages every downloadable photo and video in the Showcase into one ZIP — the same "Download All" visitors already know from photo galleries and video collections, now spanning both media types at once.

If a Showcase's total downloadable size is over 4 GB, the button works differently: instead of building the ZIP while the visitor waits in the browser, it's built in the background — split into a few parts if needed — and a link is emailed to them once it's ready, the same "email delivery instead" flow large galleries and video collections already use.

The emailed download link stays valid for a limited number of days before it expires. A part may mix photos and videos together, in whatever order they appear in the Showcase.

Publishing

A new Showcase is unpublished (a Draft badge in the list) until you click the publish button on its row. While unpublished, its public link shows a generic "not currently available" page to anyone else — but you (or the client, for one they own) can always open Preview from the curation screen to see it exactly as a visitor will, bypassing only the unpublished state, not a password.

Sharing the link

Every Showcase gets its own public link in the form /m/{token}, shown on the curation screen with a Copy link button and a downloadable QR code — the same pattern as gallery and video shortlinks. See QR codes for what to do with the QR image itself.

A password (if you set one) and an expiry date work exactly as they do on a shortlink: a password-set Showcase prompts a visitor for it before showing anything, and an expired link shows "Link Expired" instead of the Showcase — the Showcase itself isn't deleted, so clearing or extending the expiry date brings the link back to life.

Editing a Showcase later and leaving Link expiry on "Keep current" preserves its existing expiry date — you only need to touch that field when you actually want to change it.

What visitors see

A published Showcase renders as one mosaic page — visually the same style as a photo gallery — with photo tiles and video tiles side by side in your chosen order. Clicking any tile, photo or video, opens the same lightbox carousel, so a visitor can flip from a still straight into a video and back without leaving the page.

Deleting a Showcase

Click the trash icon on a Showcase's row, then type DELETE to confirm. This removes the Showcase and its item list only — the original photos and videos are untouched in their galleries and collections. Its public link stops working immediately and can't be recovered.

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