How to Send a Sneak Peek Gallery (2026)

You shot an 11-hour wedding on Saturday. By Sunday lunchtime there are 1,400 keepers on the drive, the couple has promised their group chat something, and the full gallery is six weeks out.

Everyone in that group chat is currently deciding, without knowing it, whether to ask you for a quote next spring.

That is the window a sneak peek gallery fills. Most photographers send one, and most send it badly: 40 half-graded frames dumped into a link at midnight on day nine, with no caption, no credit line and no way back to the site.

The peek goes out, the couple posts two phone snaps instead, and the moment is gone.

A sneak peek gallery is a small, finished set of 8 to 15 images delivered within a day or two of a shoot, before the full gallery, with the express purpose of being seen by people who are not your client. It is not a preview. It is an ad you are allowed to deliver.

Full disclosure: Framekit is our product, so read this as a vendor writing about its own category. Every competitor figure here comes from that vendor's own pricing page or help centre, read in September 2026 and linked where the page will serve a link. Pixieset, CloudSpot, Pic-Time and ShootProof all beat us on print sales, which we do not do at all, and Pixieset beats us on pre-release sign-up campaigns.

How this guide was put together

Nobody here has run a controlled experiment on sneak peeks, and you should distrust any page that says it has, so this guide separates what was read at the source from what was worked out on paper and what photographers say in public.

Read at the source: every plan price, storage limit and gallery setting named below comes from the vendor's own pricing page or help centre in September 2026, and each of those pages is linked where the vendor serves a link to a non-browser request.

Calculated: the frame counts, turnaround windows and the cost comparison are arithmetic on the carried example, shown so you can redo it with your own numbers.

Reported by photographers: where something is a common practice rather than a documented feature, it is flagged in the sentence itself.

The carried example through this guide is one job: an 11-hour wedding, 1,400 keepers, a full gallery promised in six weeks, and a sneak peek of 12 frames inside 36 hours.

Every number in the steps refers back to that job so you can scale it to a two-hour portrait session or a three-day brand shoot without guessing.

One thing this guide does not do is rank gallery platforms. The blog already has that in the client gallery comparison for wedding photographers, and repeating a ranking inside a procedure helps nobody.

The sneak peek by the numbers

Before the steps, here are the figures worth carrying into the decision, because most of the argument about sneak peeks is really an argument about size and timing that nobody has put numbers on.

• 8 to 15 frames. Enough for a carousel and a story, few enough that the full gallery still lands as a reveal six weeks later.
• 24 to 48 hours. The window where the client is still telling people about the day, before the emails about it start.
• 1 of 1,400. On the carried wedding, twelve peek frames are under one percent of the keepers, which is why a peek does not spoil a gallery.
• $0. Framekit's free plan carries unlimited galleries with watermarking, a gallery password, a separate download PIN, email registration and auto expiry included, on 10GB of pooled storage.
• 5GB and three galleries. CloudSpot's free plan caps you at three client galleries and 5GB, per its pricing page, which is fine for peeks and tight for delivery.
• 100 photos. ShootProof's free plan holds 100 photos in total across up to 5GB, per its plans page, so a peek fits and a wedding does not.

In one lineThe sneak peek is small enough that every platform on the market can host one for nothing, which means the decision is never about storage and always about whether the link carries your name, your domain and a route back to your site.

Step 1. Decide which job the peek is doing

A sneak peek can do four different jobs and it cannot do all four at once, so pick one before you open Lightroom, because the job you pick changes which frames you cull, whether you watermark, and what the caption asks for.

The four jobs are: get the client posting, buy yourself time on the full gallery, sell an upgrade, or collect email addresses from people who were at the event.

Get the client posting is the default and the most valuable. The frames are the ones the client is in, flattering, and legible at phone size. The caption asks for a tag.

Buy time is the quiet one. If your contract says six weeks and you are worried about week four, a peek on day two resets the clock in the client's head.

The frames here should be varied, not flattering: one getting-ready, one ceremony, one portrait, one reception, so it reads as coverage and not as a highlight reel.

Sell an upgrade means the peek is a shop window for an album, a second shooter's set or a print product you fulfil elsewhere. Choose frames that only work large.

Collect emails applies at events with guests rather than clients: a conference, a race, a school shoot. That is a different mechanism, covered in step 7.

Verdict: If you cannot name the job in one sentence, send the "get the client posting" version and keep it to 10 frames, because a peek with no purpose still beats no peek and a peek with four purposes beats nothing at all.

Step 2. Pick the frames, and cut the number in half

12 frames is the working default for a full wedding day and most photographers' first pass lands somewhere near 30, so the real skill in this step is subtraction.

The test is simple: every frame in the peek has to survive being seen next to every other frame in the peek, on a phone, by someone who was not there.

Three rules do most of the work.

One hero, not three. Pick the single frame you would put on the homepage and build the other 11 around it. Two heroes compete and both lose.

No near-duplicates. If two frames are the same moment a second apart, the second one belongs in the full gallery. A peek with two visible near-duplicates reads like an export, not a selection.

No frame that needs a story. The peek travels to people who were not at the shoot. A picture that only works if you explain who the man crying in the corner is will not work in a stranger's feed.

Here is how the count scales across shoot types. These are working defaults, not rules handed down from anywhere.

The frames in a peek must be finished, not roughed. A peek is the first time the client sees your colour, and a half-graded frame teaches them that your look is inconsistent. If you cannot finish 12 frames in 36 hours, send six.

In one lineCutting a 30-frame first pass to 12 is not a compromise on generosity, it is the entire mechanism by which a peek reads as a selection rather than an export, and it is the step most photographers skip.

Step 3. Put it in a gallery, not in an attachment

Send the peek as a branded gallery link and not as a WhatsApp album, an email attachment or a transfer service, because everything the peek is supposed to do for you depends on the link carrying your name and being alive in three months when someone forwards it.

A transfer link is a delivery mechanism with an expiry date attached; a gallery is a page.

The practical difference shows up in three places. A gallery link has your logo and colours on it, so when the maid of honour opens it on the train she sees who shot it. A gallery link does not expire on a countdown you did not set.

And a gallery link can carry a favourites tool, a download setting and a share toggle, which is how you control what happens next.

Transfer services are the common wrong answer here, and the four limits below are why. WeTransfer's own plan-limits page puts the free tier at up to 10 transfers or 3GB in any 30-day period, and lists custom expiration, password protection and branded pages under the Ultimate plan rather than the free one.

That is a perfectly good way to move files to a retoucher. It is a poor way to hand a wedding party something they will forward.

Here is the short list of places a peek actually goes, with what each one does not do.

Framekit is the pick here for one narrow reason: unlimited galleries on the free plan with watermarking, a gallery password, a separate download PIN, email registration and auto expiry all included, so a peek never costs you a gallery slot.

If you are already delivering on Pixieset or ShootProof, put the peek there and skip this step entirely.

There is no prize for splitting a client across two platforms, and the platform comparison covers the move properly if you are thinking about one.

Step 4. Make the watermark call on purpose

Watermark the guest-facing peek and leave the client-facing peek clean, because the two audiences are doing different things with the file and a single blanket rule gets one of them wrong.

The client is going to post the frame and tag you; a watermark on that frame makes the post look like a proof and lowers the chance it goes up at all.

A stranger at an event is going to save the frame and never think about you again; a watermark is the only thing that travels with it.

The mechanics matter more than the policy. Watermarks in gallery platforms apply to the display image and not to the download, and the two or three exceptions per platform are where photographers get caught.

Pixieset's help centre documents this precisely: watermarks apply to display images, are always removed for print orders and for original or high-resolution downloads, and on web-sized downloads are removed by default unless you change that setting, with watermarks not applying to videos or video downloads at all.

Read your own platform's version of that paragraph before you rely on it.

Framekit includes watermarking on every plan, free included, alongside the gallery password and the separate download PIN. What no platform gives you is protection against a screenshot, which is the actual way peek frames leak.

If a frame matters enough that a screenshot would hurt, the answer is not a heavier watermark, it is a smaller peek.

The related question is file size. Send peek frames at display resolution and keep full-resolution downloads for the real gallery.

That is not stinginess, it is sequencing: the peek is for looking at, the gallery is for keeping, and collapsing the two means the delivery you get paid for has nothing left to reveal. The watermarking tools comparison goes deeper if you are choosing a mark rather than a moment.

Step 5. Switch sharing on, then ask for the credit

Turn social sharing on for a peek you want posted, turn it off for anything sensitive, and write the credit line you want into the message instead of hoping for it, because the client writes that caption in the 60 seconds before they post and will use whatever you put in writing.

Most platforms make this a single toggle, and most photographers leave it at whatever the default was.

Framekit galleries carry optional social sharing, so the toggle is there on every plan and you decide per gallery.

Pic-Time documents the opposite move plainly: its gallery security article says unchecking Allow sharing will "remove the gallery guest's ability to share a link", and its Sensitive Security Policy goes further by restricting access to email invitations only.

For a boudoir or a newborn peek that is the setting you want, and the boudoir gallery guide is the fuller version of that conversation.

The credit line itself should be one specific sentence, not a plea. Compare these two:

Feel free to tag me if you post any of these.

If you post, tag the studio and the venue in the caption rather than the photo, so it stays visible when the post gets shared.

The second one gets acted on because it tells the client exactly what to do and why it matters. The photo tag disappears from a reshared post; the caption mention does not.

That is a detail almost nobody writes down, and it is the difference between a credit that survives the second and third share and one that does not.

In one lineThe sharing toggle and the credit line are the two smallest settings in the whole workflow and they decide almost everything about whether the peek does any marketing work at all, so treat them as the deliverable rather than as housekeeping.

Step 6. Write the message that goes with the link

Send the link inside a message that sets the frame count, the turnaround for the full gallery and the one action you want, because a bare link forces the client to invent all three and they will invent them wrong.

Three sentences is the right length. Anything longer gets skimmed past the link.

Here is the wedding version, which you can keep as a template and change four words per job:

12 frames from Saturday are up now, finished and ready to post; the full gallery lands the week of the 2nd.

If you share any of them, a mention of the studio in the caption is the thing that helps us most.

The link stays live, so send it on to anyone who keeps asking.

For a commercial client, the same three sentences carry different content: what the frames are for, when usage starts, and who at their end needs to approve before anything goes out.

For a portrait client, cut it to two sentences and drop the credit request entirely if the session was private.

Two things to leave out. Do not apologise for the number of frames, because naming 12 as a small number teaches the client to read it as one.

And do not promise a date for the full gallery that is earlier than your contract says, which is the most common way a peek creates a problem instead of solving one.

Step 7. At events, make the peek collect something

When the people looking at the peek are guests rather than clients, switch the goal from sharing to capture, because an event peek is the cheapest list-building moment a photographer gets and it lasts about 48 hours before the guests move on.

This is where a peek stops being a courtesy and starts being a funnel, and it is also the one step of the eight where Framekit is not the strongest tool on the market.

The mechanism is email registration: the visitor enters an email address before they see the frames, and the address lands in your dashboard.

Framekit has email registration on every plan, including Free, so the basic version of this works at $0.

CloudSpot documents the same idea as email capture, where visitors "enter their name and email to view the Gallery" and the addresses export as a CSV, in its email-collection article.

Where the competition is genuinely ahead is the pre-release pattern.

Pixieset's help centre describes a pre-release collection status where the gallery stays unpublished, visitors see only a sign-up page and cannot reach any photos, and publishing the collection can automatically create an email campaign to notify everyone who registered.

CloudSpot documents a manual version of the same thing in its pre-release guide, where you publish a "coming soon" placeholder behind email capture and swap in the real frames later, keeping one link throughout.

Framekit does not do pre-release sign-up pages or email campaigns, and it does not do invoicing, booking or CRM either.

If your event work depends on collecting 300 addresses at a race and mailing them when the gallery goes live, Pixieset is the better fit for that job and you should use it.

The honest Framekit version of an event peek is a gallery with email registration on and a link you send yourself. The event gallery comparison covers the whole category if that is the work you do.

Verdict: Use Framekit's email registration when the peek is one gallery for one client's guests; use Pixieset's pre-release collections when the peek is the front end of a list-building campaign, because that is a feature we do not have and pretending otherwise would not survive your first race weekend.

Step 8. Close the loop back to your site

Point the peek at something, because the whole value of the link travelling is wasted if it dead-ends in a grid, and the natural destination is the page where a reader can see more work and enquire.

In practice that means three things: your logo links to your site, the gallery sits on your own domain, and the full gallery replaces the peek instead of living beside it for 18 months.

The domain part is not vanity. A peek link on a platform's subdomain teaches every person who forwards it the platform's name rather than yours, and across 20 weddings a year that is 20 links doing a competitor's advertising.

Framekit puts galleries on your own domain and removes the Framekit badge on paid plans from $9 a month, and Pixieset's custom domain starts on Basic at $8 a month billed annually, per its pricing page.

Both of those are small numbers against the alternative.

Framekit is an AI website builder that also runs client galleries on the same account, which is the only reason it belongs in a sneak peek guide at all: the peek, the full gallery and the portfolio page the peek drives traffic to are one login and one bill rather than three.

If you already have a site you like, that is not a reason to move, and the guide to getting clients from your website is more useful to you than a migration.

The last piece is retirement. Set an expiry on the peek for 14 days after the full gallery lands, so there is exactly one live link to your work from that job. Framekit has auto expiry on every plan; so do Pixieset, CloudSpot and Pic-Time.

A peek still sitting live 18 months later is a page of your weakest 12 frames competing with your best 400.

What the peek is actually worth, in numbers you can check

In one lineA sneak peek costs about 90 minutes of editing and $0 to host, and the only honest way to value it is to count the enquiries that arrive within 10 days of a peek going out, which is a number your inbox already knows.

Here is the test, and it is one you can run on your own last twelve months rather than on anyone's survey. Pull your enquiry emails for the year.

Mark each one that mentions a specific wedding, session or event by name, or that arrived from someone who was at one. Now look at the date against the date you sent that job's peek.

If the cluster sits inside two weeks of a peek, the peek is doing the work. If it does not cluster at all, your peeks are going out too late or too quietly, and the fix is in steps 2 and 5 rather than in more frames.

The cost side is easier. 12 frames at roughly 7 minutes each of finishing is 84 minutes, call it 90.

Hosting is $0 on Framekit's free plan, on Pixieset's free plan and on CloudSpot's free plan, and it stays $0 until you need your own domain.

On Framekit that upgrade is $9 a month, or $7 a month billed yearly, which is the point at which the peek link stops advertising a platform and starts advertising you.

For a wedding photographer shooting twenty jobs a year, that is 30 hours of finishing and $84 to $108 of hosting against 20 separate moments when 50 to 200 people look at your work while feeling something about it. There is no other marketing you own that has those inputs.

The turnaround promise you can actually keep

In one lineThe only turnaround promise worth making is the one you can hit on your worst week of the year, because a peek that arrives late does more damage to the relationship than no peek at all would have done.

Photographers break this in a predictable way. They promise 24 hours after a good Saturday in April, hit it twice, and then miss it in September when three weddings stack up and a hard drive fails. The client does not remember the two hits. They remember the silence.

Set the promise at 48 hours and beat it. A peek that lands in 20 hours against a 48-hour promise reads as generous; the same peek against a 24-hour promise reads as late by the client's arithmetic even though it is identical work.

If your contract already names a sneak peek window, match this to it rather than to your ambition.

The structural fix is to shoot for the peek. Flag 6 to 10 frames in camera or on the first cull pass, before you touch the rest of the take. Finishing 12 flagged frames on Sunday morning is a 90-minute job.

Finding 12 frames inside 1,400 on Sunday morning is a five-hour job, which is why the peek that gets skipped is almost always the peek that was never selected.

Which version should you send?

Work down these questions in order and stop at the first one that matches your job, because the right peek for a boudoir session and the right peek for a conference are almost opposites and averaging them produces something that works for neither.

Is the shoot private, sensitive or under NDA? Then send a password-protected gallery with sharing switched off, watermark the display images, and skip the credit request entirely.

Pic-Time's Sensitive Security Policy or a Framekit gallery with a password and a download PIN both do this; the important part is that the peek is for the client only.

Is the client a brand with an approval chain? Then send 8 to 10 frames, watermark them lightly, say in the message that these are for internal circulation until usage starts, and name the person whose sign-off releases them.

Were there guests who are not your client? Then run the event version: email registration on, watermark on, and a link you can mail again when the full gallery publishes.

If that happens on more than one job in four, use Pixieset's pre-release collections instead of ours.

Is it a wedding, a portrait session or a family shoot with no complications? Then send the default: 8 to 15 finished frames, no watermark, sharing on, a credit line in the caption, inside 48 hours, on your own domain if you have one.

Are you more than four days past the shoot? Then it is not a sneak peek any more. Send the full gallery when it is ready and put the effort into the delivery message instead, because a "peek" arriving in week two reads as an apology.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many photos should a sneak peek gallery have?

A sneak peek gallery should hold 8 to 15 finished images for a full wedding day, 5 to 8 for a portrait session and 8 to 10 for a brand shoot.

The number matters because a peek is judged as a set: every extra frame is another chance for a weak image to sit beside your best one. If you are torn between 12 and 20, send 12. The full gallery is where generosity belongs.

How fast should a sneak peek go out?

Send a sneak peek within 24 to 48 hours of the shoot, while the client is still telling people about it.

Promise 48 hours in writing and aim for 24, because beating a stated window reads as generous and missing one reads as late even when the work is identical.

The way to make that repeatable is to flag 6 to 10 frames during the cull instead of hunting for them after.

Should sneak peek images be watermarked?

Watermark a sneak peek when the audience includes people who are not your client, and leave it clean when the client is the one you want posting it.

A watermark on a couple's peek makes the frame look like a proof and lowers the chance it goes up. A watermark on an event gallery is the only thing that travels with a saved file.

Check where your platform applies the mark: Pixieset, for example, documents that watermarks are removed for print orders and full-resolution downloads.

Should a sneak peek gallery have a password?

Password-protect a sneak peek when the shoot is sensitive, embargoed or under NDA, and leave it open when the whole point is that the link gets forwarded.

Framekit includes a gallery password and a separate download PIN on every plan including Free, so you can lock viewing and downloading independently.

For an ordinary wedding peek, a password costs you more shares than it prevents leaks, because the 40 guests who would have forwarded it now cannot.

Is a sneak peek the same as a pre-release gallery?

No. A sneak peek shows a small set of finished frames now; a pre-release gallery shows no photos at all and collects email addresses from people who want to be told when the real gallery is ready.

Pixieset documents pre-release as a collection status where visitors see only a sign-up page and cannot reach any photos, with an email campaign available at publish.

Use a peek for clients and a pre-release page for events with hundreds of strangers.

Does sending a sneak peek spoil the full gallery?

12 frames out of 1,400 is 0.86 percent of a wedding take, so a sneak peek does not spoil a full gallery in any measurable way.

What does spoil the reveal is sending 40 frames, sending them at full resolution, or sending them without finishing them. Keep the peek small, display-resolution and fully graded and the delivery six weeks later still lands as an event.

What should I write when I send the link?

Write three sentences: how many frames are in the peek, when the full gallery lands, and the one action you want.

Name the frame count instead of apologising for it, give a full-gallery date that matches your contract and not your hopes, and ask for a caption mention instead of a photo tag, because a caption mention survives a reshare and a photo tag does not.

Where should a sneak peek gallery be hosted?

Host a sneak peek on a branded gallery on your own domain and not on a file-transfer link, so the page carries your name and stays live when it gets forwarded.

Framekit, Pixieset, CloudSpot and Pic-Time all host one free; WeTransfer's own plan-limits page puts password protection and custom expiration on the Ultimate plan, which is why transfer links make poor peeks.

Can I post the sneak peek on Instagram before the client sees it?

Give the client the gallery link first, even if only by an hour, because the peek is a gift and posting it first turns it into an advertisement the client discovers by scrolling.

For brand and commercial work, do not post at all until usage has started and the named approver has signed off, and put that rule in the message you send with the link so nobody has to ask.

Does a sneak peek gallery need to collect email addresses?

Only when the viewers are guests rather than your client. For a wedding couple, an email gate adds friction to the one moment you want frictionless.

For a conference, a race or a school shoot, email registration turns a peek into a list: Framekit includes it on every plan, and CloudSpot documents the same pattern as email capture with a CSV export.

Match the gate to the audience, not to your appetite for contacts.

Final Verdict

Send 8 to 15 finished frames inside 48 hours, on a branded gallery on your own domain, with sharing on, a caption mention requested by name, and an expiry set for a fortnight after the full delivery.

That is the whole method, and it costs $0 to start on Framekit, Pixieset or CloudSpot.

Framekit is the pick when the peek and the portfolio should live on one account: unlimited galleries on the free plan, watermarking, a gallery password, a separate download PIN, email registration and auto expiry all included at $0, and your own domain from $9 a month.

Where Framekit losesif you sell prints, we do not do it at all and Pixieset, Pic-Time and ShootProof do; if your event work depends on pre-release sign-up pages with an email campaign at publish, Pixieset has that feature and we do not; and if you want invoicing, contracts or a CRM attached to the same workflow, Framekit does not do any of those, so a studio management tool belongs next to it rather than instead of it.

If you shoot four weddings a year, do not move platforms for this. Put the peek wherever you already deliver and spend the saved effort on steps 2 and 5, which are free and carry most of the result.

Related readinghow to create a client gallery covers the delivery the peek leads into, how to deliver photos to clients is the full handover process, client galleries versus WeTransfer settles the transfer-link question with numbers, and moving from Instagram to your own website is the longer version of the argument in step eight.

The peek is one step in the longer sequence in what to send a client after a photo shoot, and if the images are not for public posting yet, how to password protect a client gallery covers the four controls.