A photography portfolio website that gets you booked, and how to build it

A photography portfolio website has a simpler job than most sites and a harder one: the pictures have to carry it, so everything else has to get out of the way and still get a client from the first image to the booking. This is the FolioPage guide for photographers of every kind - wedding, portrait and headshot, family, fashion and editorial, commercial and product, food, architecture, travel, landscape, documentary, sports, wildlife, event, real estate, fine art, boudoir, pet and drone - on what such a site has to do, how series and galleries work in the Portfolio app, how your images are handled, what a client gallery is and is not, the templates built for the field, the plan that fits, and how to have it live this afternoon.

What a photography website has to do

A client who lands on your site is asking four questions, usually within a minute: is this the look I want, have they shot what I need, can I afford them, and how do I book. A social profile answers the first one in a square crop and leaves the rest to a direct message. A portfolio site answers all four in the order the client asks them.

That gives the site four jobs:

• Show the work first. The best images, large, before any words. A client decides on the look in the first screen.
• Sort it the way clients think. Weddings, portraits, editorial, products: a series per shoot and a category per kind of work, so the wedding client sees weddings.
• Tell the story of a series. A page per shoot with the whole set and a few lines about it: the place, the brief, the light.
• Make booking obvious. Packages or a price range, and a form or an address that reaches you, at the end of every path.

And one job underneath the others: load fast on a phone, because that is where clients open the link a friend sent them, and a gallery that takes six seconds to appear has already lost them.

The pages that earn their place

Wedding, portrait, family, headshot, event and real estate photographers need all six. Editorial, commercial and fine-art photographers can drop the pricing page and let the contact page carry a line about rates and licensing. The templates in this category come with these pages in place; you remove the ones you do not need.

Series, not single images: the Portfolio app

This is the part built for photographers. In the Portfolio app every shoot is an item with its own gallery of images, a cover, a title, a short description and a category. From those items the app publishes two things:

• The index: one grid of every series, with filter buttons built from your categories. A visitor clicks "Weddings" and the grid rearranges without leaving the page.
• A page per series: the full set in the template's gallery, opening full screen in a lightbox, with the description beside it and links to the next and previous series.

The index and the series pages each have their own layouts, thirty for the index and twenty-four for the series page, from tight masonry walls to wide single columns, chosen in the app's settings and changed at any time without touching the images.

Categories are yours to name: weddings, portraits, editorial, food, or the names of clients if that is how your work is asked for. The Free plan holds ten series and three categories, Pro a hundred series and fifty categories, Max as many as you shoot.

What happens to your images

Photographers ask this before anything else, so here is exactly what happens to a file:

• The original is kept as you uploaded it and served whenever an image is viewed at full size, in the lightbox or on a full-bleed section.
• A WebP thumbnail at 800 pixels on the long side is made for grids, previews and the dashboard, so index pages stay light without your files being touched.
• Everything is delivered from a global edge network, the same one that serves the pages, so a heavy portfolio opens as fast in Sydney as in Berlin.
• Uploads go into folders, one per shoot if you like, by drag and drop, and the same file can be used in any number of series or sections.

The limits per plan, since they decide which plan is yours:

For the web, export a JPEG at 2,000 to 2,500 pixels on the long edge at 80 percent quality; it looks identical to a client on any screen and weighs a few hundred kilobytes. Keep the print files on your own drives. The 8,000-pixel ceiling on Max is for fine-art work that is viewed full screen on large displays, and for video.

Galleries on any page

Series live in the Portfolio app; galleries live everywhere else. The section library holds more than thirty gallery sections - contact sheets, filmstrips, polaroid walls, scroll strips, light tables, a filterable grid, a world map with pins - and most of them open their images in a lightbox. They are how a homepage shows the best twelve, how an About page shows a behind-the-scenes set, and how a client gallery holds a delivery.

Every section is edited on the page: drop in images from the library, reorder them, write the caption, and preview on desktop and phone before you publish.

Booking, pricing and inquiries

The path from a series to a booking is three sections:

• A pricing or packages section on the pricing page or the homepage, from the library, in the template's style.
• A contact or booking form that lands in your inbox, with spam protection built in, on the Pro and Max plans: 1,000 submissions a month on Pro, 5,000 on Max. On the Free plan the contact page carries an email address and the form waits.
• A "Book" button in the header, which several templates for this field carry and any header can be given, so the path to an inquiry is one click from anywhere.

Client galleries: what they are, and what they are not

On Pro and Max, any page can be protected with a password and hidden from search engines. A client gallery on FolioPage is exactly that: a page with a gallery section, a password you send to one client, and a link that works on their phone. It is the right tool for showing a family their selects, a couple their wedding preview, or a brand the frames from a shoot.

It is not a proofing system. Clients cannot pick favorites, comment or download originals through it, and one page has one password. For proofing and delivery at scale, keep a dedicated service and put its link on your site; for a quick private preview, the page does the job with nothing extra to pay for.

What changes with what you shoot

The pattern holds; the emphasis moves. A short map:

Each of these deserves its own guide, and they will follow in the Guides section, one at a time.

Templates made for photographers

Ten FolioPage templates were built for this category, eight of them one-page sites and two with several pages, every one with the Portfolio app switched on and a set of sample series in place. Three of them show the range:

Preview any of them live on desktop and on a phone. The structure and the pace are what you are choosing; the pictures will be yours in an hour.

The full set is on the Photography templates page.

The plan that fits

Photography is the one field where the Free plan is a starting point rather than a home, because of the file count:

• Free holds fifty files, which is five series of ten images, and ten series in the Portfolio app. Enough to build the site, choose the look and show it to a few people. No card, no time limit.
• Pro, $12 a month or $108 a year, is the working photographer's plan: a thousand files and 2 GB, images to 4,000 pixels, a hundred series, a domain you own, no branding, the booking form, and password-protected client galleries.
• Max, $24 a month or $216 a year, is for video, for fine-art files to 8,000 pixels, for 10 GB of storage and unlimited series, and for the Blog app if you write.

Build on Free, move to Pro on the day the site goes on your business card. The pricing page has the full comparison.

Build it this afternoon

The order that works, assuming the selects are made and exported.

The longer version, with the schedule by the hour, is the guide on how to build a portfolio website in a day.

Keep it current

• Add a series a month. Nothing dates a photography site like a newest shoot from two years ago.
• Retire, do not accumulate. When a new series is stronger than the weakest old one, swap them. The grid stays the size a client can take in.
• Update the availability line. "Booking autumn weddings" is the sentence that makes people write.

How large should my images be?

Export at 2,000 to 2,500 pixels on the long edge, JPEG at 80 percent. That is sharp on every screen and light enough for a phone on a poor connection. The plan's ceiling (2,000, 4,000 or 8,000 pixels) is the maximum, not the target.

Do you resize or compress my photographs?

The original is kept exactly as uploaded and served for the full-size view. A WebP thumbnail is made for grids and previews so pages stay fast. Your files are never touched.

Can clients see images full screen?

Yes. Series pages and gallery sections open images in a lightbox at full size, and the full-size view serves the original file.

Can I make a private gallery for a client?

On Pro and Max, yes: a page with a gallery, a password, hidden from search. It is a private preview, not a proofing system, so there is no client-side selection or download of originals.

Can I sell prints or offer downloads?

FolioPage has no shop of its own. Link your print store or delivery service from a button or from the Links page, and keep the portfolio as the place where the booking starts.

Other fields have their own page in the Made for section, and every general how-to lives in Guides.