Client galleries and the print store

ShootCal Galleries is the delivery side of ShootCal: you publish a shoot to a private, branded gallery, your client picks favorites and downloads the full-resolution files, and orders prints and wall art that White House Custom Colour (WHCC) produces and drop-ships under your brand. This article covers how the whole thing works, from publish to payout.

One client list with your ShootCal calendar

Galleries and the ShootCal scheduling web app use one verified ShootCal account and password, while keeping separate browser sessions and product data. The gallery client picker searches both products at once (your ShootCal clients show a badge), and picking one fills in their email and links the gallery to them. The Galleries Clients page shows each client’s bookings and contract status from the app beside their delivery activity.

You can create a client's gallery whenever you are ready. From the client's page in the ShootCal app, choose Create gallery. It arrives as an empty, unlisted draft named after the client and dated to the session, so nothing is visible to anyone until you share it.

Delivering a gallery

A gallery is your cover photo full-screen, your studio name or logo, and a clean, justified grid of previews with a swipeable full-screen viewer. Each gallery can be public, unlisted (anyone with the link), or password protected on a paid plan; you choose per gallery.

When the gallery is ready, you send the delivery email from the composer: there is a Pixieset-style default template, a gallery-hero HTML email, a template dropdown (including any templates you save yourself), insertable merge fields for the client’s name and the gallery link, and a preview of the exact email before it sends. Clients get fast, one-click full-resolution downloads of your untouched files.

Clients never create accounts. Opening the gallery just works from the link; to favorite photos or place an order they enter their email, and that’s it. This is deliberate: every client account you don’t force is a delivery that doesn’t stall at a login screen.

Proofing and favorites

Every photo has a heart. Clients favorite the images they love, filter to just those, and send you their selections with one button. You see exactly which photos each client picked, which is what you want for albums, retouching lists, and print recommendations. Favorites are tied to the client’s email, so a couple can each make their own list.

Publishing from Lightroom Classic

The ShootCal Galleries publish plugin turns a Lightroom Classic published collection into a gallery. Sign in once with the same ShootCal email and password you use on the web, publish, and the collection uploads directly to cloud storage; re-edit and re-publish, and the gallery updates in place, including removals. If an upload is interrupted it heals itself on the next publish. Naming a new published collection exactly like an existing gallery (one you created from the client's page, for instance) uploads the photos into that gallery instead of creating a duplicate, and your gallery list sorts by whichever gallery most recently received photos, so it jumps to the top. You can download the plugin here, and the setup steps live in your studio admin under Settings.

Custom domains and branding

On Plus or Pro, you can connect galleries.yourstudio.com with a CNAME record, and new gallery links use your domain. Your logo and studio name appear on every gallery on every plan. See Custom Domains for ShootCal Galleries and Websites for the exact setup.

The print store and the WHCC lab

Status: live. Print ordering is available after a studio completes the store setup in Galleries. Here is how it works.

Clients shop straight from their gallery. The catalog is fulfilled by White House Custom Colour (WHCC), a professional lab, and every order is produced and drop-shipped under your brand:

• Photo prints on Lustre, Deep Matte, or Pearl paper, with optional borders and matboard or foamboard mounting.
• Gallery-wrap canvas with image-wrap, black, or white edges, ready to hang.
• Metal prints, dye-sublimated aluminum with a high-gloss finish.
• Acrylic prints, face-mounted on quarter-inch acrylic.
• Framed prints with real wood and metal mouldings, plus surface, mat, and hanging options.
• Standouts, maple wood prints, and freestanding acrylic blocks.
• Photo cards, 5×7 flat cards from a design library, sold in packs.

Every wall-art product opens a full-screen editor with a fixed print window: the client drags and zooms their photo inside the exact crop that will print, picks a size, and watches the price update live. A true-scale “See it on your wall” room preview shows the finished piece at real size before they buy.

The cart and checkout

Adding to the cart lands the client on the cart itself, with the new line highlighted under a persistent “Added to your order” note and an “Add more photos” tile that takes them straight back to the photo grid to keep shopping. Adding the same photo in the same size, options, and crop again bumps that line’s quantity instead of creating a duplicate row. The cart shows cropped previews and clear line items, clients can change quantities or remove lines, and there is a Discount code box for your print coupon codes. Checkout is its own page with a compact order summary beside the shipping form, and after the order ships, the client gets a tracking email automatically.

Pricing you control, commission you mostly don’t pay

You set the retail pricing. ShootCal’s default markup is a sliding scale, higher on small prints and lower on large wall art, so an 8×10 earns you a healthy margin without a 30×40 canvas costing your client a fortune. You can override any price. On the pricing page the markup shows as percentages (cheapest print to priciest piece), the minimum price for any item is a dollar amount you type in, and photo cards use one flat markup percentage, since WHCC’s card designer supports a single rate.

The commission is simple: 15% on the Free plan, 0% on every paid plan. It is charged only on the product price, never on shipping or sales tax. There are no listing fees, no monthly store fee, and nothing charged when there are no sales. If you sell prints regularly, a $12/mo Plus plan with 0% commission almost always beats a free plan paying 15%.

Getting paid with Stripe

Payments go directly to you. In your studio admin, open Payments & fulfillment and choose “Connect with Stripe” to link your own Stripe account (or create one on the spot). From then on you are the merchant of record: your client’s card payment settles into your Stripe balance on your normal payout schedule, and ShootCal never holds your money. The lab’s cost is handled automatically inside the transaction, so what lands with you is your margin.

Because the charge is yours, refunds and disputes are handled in your own Stripe dashboard. Paid orders wait for your review before the irreversible lab step (24 hours by default, with supported delays from 6 hours to 7 days, or you can release a clean order early). A full refund or dispute during that delay stops fulfillment and returns the ShootCal application fee. After WHCC accepts an order, its production cost cannot be reversed even if a later refund or chargeback occurs.

When a client has a problem with a print

Prints are made and drop-shipped by WHCC, but every order is placed on ShootCal's WHCC account, so WHCC cannot open a case for your studio directly. The path is short:

1. Ask the client for photos of the item and the packaging, and for what went wrong (damaged in shipping, a manufacturing defect, a wrong or missing item). Ask them not to refuse a damaged shipment.
2. Open the order in your studio admin (Print store → the order). Once WHCC has the order, the right-hand column shows a Client reported a problem? panel with the ShootCal reference (SCG-123) and the WHCC confirmation number, plus an Email ShootCal about this order button that prefills both.
3. Send that email with the photos. ShootCal files the remake with WHCC on your behalf. WHCC replaces items damaged in shipping or with a manufacturing defect at no charge, on its normal production time and standard shipping. You will hear back on that same thread.

Two honest notes. A change of mind, a crop the client chose, or normal screen-to-print color differences are not defects, and custom prints cannot otherwise be returned; that is also what the client agreed to in the print purchase terms at checkout. And refunds remain yours: because the client paid you directly, any refund you decide to give is issued from your own Stripe dashboard.

Sales tax

ShootCal uses Stripe Tax to calculate sales tax automatically from the customer’s shipping address, using the correct destination rate. You add the states where you are registered to collect inside your own Stripe dashboard; checkout then collects tax for those states and it settles with the rest of the payment. Two honest notes: registering in Stripe is not the same as registering with a state (you need the state’s sales-tax license first), and ShootCal does not file returns for you. Checkout collects tax only where the connected Stripe account has an active registration. The photographer remains responsible for deciding where registration is required, configuring Stripe Tax, filing, and remitting; ShootCal does not provide tax advice or file returns.

Print coupon codes

You can give clients a studio-funded print coupon to spend on prints or wall art. Create one in your studio admin under Print store → Store settings: pick the dollar amount, set how many completed uses it allows per gallery, and choose whether it also covers shipping. Every new studio starts with an inactive $50 coupon ready to activate. Share the code in your delivery email (there is a ready-made “Gallery ready + print coupon” template) and the client enters it in the Discount code box in the cart. ShootCal commission is calculated on the product price before the discount, so the coupon is funded by your studio rather than reducing the commission.

Privacy and content safety

Galleries are private by default and are never indexed or marketed. Client favorites are tied to their email only; there are no client accounts to breach. The platform runs professional content-safety scanning on uploads, and every gallery has a content-report link. Questions about the store or your plan? Reach out on the support page, I read every message.