The shoot is only half the job. What happens to your photos afterwards, how they are prepared, named and handed over, makes a real difference to how useful they are to your business. It is also the part most photographers never talk about, so I thought I would pull back the curtain on exactly how I do it.
A quick note before I start: this is how I work as of June 2026. The tools photographers use change over time, and if I switch anything I will update this. Right now, my delivery runs through a platform called Pixieset, and here is the whole process from export to your inbox.
Step one: exporting at full resolution
When I finish editing, I export every image at the highest resolution. No shrinking, no compromise. You get the full-quality files, suitable for anything from a website to large-format print.
I do this because I do not know everything you will need the images for, and I would rather give you the best possible starting point. A high-resolution master can always be scaled down for the web. A small file can never be scaled up. So you get the full quality, and you decide how to use it.
(If you want the detail on how to then size those images down for your website, I have written a separate guide on using photos on your website. The short version: I can also hand over web-ready versions so you are not stuck doing it yourself.)
Step two: naming the files properly
This is the bit almost no photographer bothers with, and it quietly matters a lot.
Every file I deliver is named after what it actually is: the business, the event, or the person in the shot, followed by my studio name. So instead of handing you a folder of “DSC_4831.jpg”, you get something like:
Anglia-Translations-Team-Headshots | Nate Lansdell Photography
There are two reasons I do this, and they both work in your favour.
First, it is simply easier for you. When you or your marketing team are hunting for the right image months later, a descriptive name beats a meaningless camera code every time. You can actually find things.
Second, and this is the part most people miss: it helps your search engine optimisation. When you upload an image to your website, the filename is one of the signals search engines read to understand what the picture shows. A file called “anglia-translations-team-headshots” tells Google something useful. A file called “DSC_4831” tells it nothing. So by naming your images properly before you ever receive them, I am giving your website a small, honest head start in search, including in Google Images. It is a little thing that no stock photo and very few photographers will ever give you.
Step three: your gallery
Once everything is exported and named, I upload the full-resolution files to a private online gallery on Pixieset, and this is where the experience gets genuinely better than a folder of files or a file-transfer link.
Pixieset is a beautiful way to present photography. Your images are displayed properly, full-screen, the way they are meant to be seen, rather than as thumbnails in a download folder. You get your own gallery with its own link.
That custom link is more useful than it sounds, especially when I work with marketing teams, which is a lot of my commercial work. On a commercial shoot, the photos are rarely for one person. There is a marketing manager, maybe a director, a designer, sometimes an external agency, and all of them need to see the work. A single shared gallery link solves that. The team can sit in a meeting room and view the whole set on a big screen together, or each person can open the gallery on their own laptop and browse at their own pace. Everyone is looking at the same set, properly presented, wherever they are. No giant email attachments, no “can you resend that one”, no version confusion.
Keeping your images secure
Because these are your business images, control matters. The gallery gives me, and you, real control over who sees what and what they can do with it.
I can password-protect a gallery, so only the people you want can get in. I can add a download PIN, a separate code required before anyone can download the files, which is useful when a gallery is shared more widely than the people allowed to download from it. And I can set download limits, controlling how many images can be taken, or which sets are available to download at all.
For a lot of commercial clients this is exactly what they want: the whole team can view everything, but downloading is controlled. For sensitive shoots, it means the images are not just floating around unprotected.
Selling prints, and working in donations for charity
The gallery can also act as a shop. Through the built-in store, images can be made available to buy, as prints or digital downloads, directly from the gallery, with prices I set.
This is particularly useful for the charity and community work I do. For an event where the cause matters, I can set the gallery up so that people can buy their photos and the proceeds go towards the charity. It turns the gallery into a simple, dignified way to raise a bit of money: attendees get a lovely photo, and the cause benefits. It is one of my favourite ways the delivery process can do more than just hand over files.
Why all of this matters
None of this is showing off for its own sake. Every part of it exists to make your photography more useful and easier to work with.
The high-resolution files mean you are never limited by quality. The descriptive, SEO-friendly filenames mean your images are easy to find and quietly help your website. The gallery means your whole team can see and share the work without friction. The security controls mean your images stay yours. And the store means a shoot can even raise money for a good cause.
The photography is what you book me for. But the way it is delivered is part of the service, and I have built that part to be as considered as the shooting itself.
