For photographers
You spend a week editing eighty frames into a sequence — an opening, a rhythm, a last picture that had to be last. Then you hand it over as a folder, and the client opens it as a grid of thumbnails sorted by filename.
Foliant is for the last step only. The shoot becomes an album that opens in the browser and turns pages: your order, your pacing, one spread at a time, with your name on the cover instead of a file manager’s. Nothing to download, nothing to install — a link you can put in the delivery email, or in a message the client reads on a phone at the kitchen table.
Here’s one, if you’d rather look than read.
This is not a client gallery, and shouldn’t be
You already have Pixieset, Pic-Time or ShootProof, or you’ve decided which one you’re getting. Keep it. Those are business tools — they take the money, hand over the originals, and hold the client’s hand through choosing. Foliant does none of that and isn’t trying to.
Use a client gallery
- The client has to choose — favorites, retouch lists, which twelve go in the book.
- You sell prints or products, and want the store, the lab and the payout in one place.
- They need to download the originals, at full resolution, in a zip.
- You need contracts, invoices and a CRM attached to the same job.
- The gallery must be locked with a password, watermarked, or expire on a date.
Use Foliant
- The choosing is done. This is the edit, in the order you decided.
- You want it read like a book — page by page, at your pace, not scanned as a grid.
- You want to know whether they actually looked: how many opened it, how far they got.
- You want a portfolio piece a prospective client can flip through in ten seconds before they inquire.
- You want to try it without a decision — no card, nothing to cancel — because it’s a nice-to-have on top of the gallery you already pay for.
Put plainly: a gallery is where a shoot goes to be worked on, and this is where it goes when it’s finished. The two aren’t rivals — the gallery carries the job while it’s live and eventually expires, and the album is the thing the client still has a link to afterwards.
What building one is like
- Drop the photos in and the album lays itself out — two portraits side by side, two landscapes stacked, four squares as a grid, anything else full page. It reads the shapes; you override any page you disagree with.
- Frames and tone per photo — thin, shadow, polaroid, rounded, double; sepia, warm, cool, contrast, with the strength on a slider. Captions, cropping and rotation are there too.
- A cover that’s yours — your image, your title, your typeface, your paper texture, and a page-turn sound if you want one.
- Click any photo to open it large, then back to the page.
- Sections — getting ready, ceremony, dinner — become a table of contents, or stay untitled if the album reads better without.
- The client can save it for offline with one button, and install it as an app on their phone if they want it there.
Files up to 10 MB each; anything over 2560 px on the long edge is resized on the way in, because this is a screen album, not a print file.
What it won’t do
- Take payment. No print store, no packages, no invoices. The money stays where it is now.
- Deliver originals. There’s no download button and no zip. If the client needs the files, that’s the gallery’s job.
- Lock with a password. An album is either a draft, unlisted — a working link, not in search and not on your public shelf — or published. “Unlisted” means anyone holding the link can open it. For most delivery that’s fine; if a client needs a PIN, this isn’t the tool.
- Hide that it’s Foliant. Public albums and embeds carry a small “Powered by Foliant” badge, and there is currently no setting that removes it.
Better you find that out now than after an evening of work.
The editor opens straight away — no account until you want to keep it.