ProofRoom is the proofing gallery you hand a client the night you finish culling a portrait, senior or family session. They star the frames they love, build an order from your own price sheet, and your lab ships the package while you are already shooting the next family.
Every solo studio has the same week. The session was good, the culling was quick, and then the selling turns into a text thread with a mother, a grandmother and a spreadsheet you keep in your head.
A client sends back IMG_4471, then a screenshot of a different crop, then a voice note about "the one where he is laughing." You rebuild the list twice and still pull the wrong frame for the 11x14.
About 2.5 hours per session lost to list wranglingThe gallery goes out on a Thursday, the family says they love everything, then football starts and nobody decides. Six weeks later you are still holding files for a sale that never gets placed.
$380 of print revenue quietly expires per stalled sessionYou polish twelve favorites on faith so the gallery looks finished. The mother picks four different frames, and the skin work on the other eight goes straight into the archive folder.
Roughly 9 wasted retouch hours a month at $85 an hourOnce the lab order goes in, the questions start. Did the canvas ship, is the 8x10 in the same box, can we still add a grandparent print before it leaves the print queue.
31 status messages in an average senior season monthA ProofRoom gallery is not a download page with a contact form bolted on. It is the room where the family sits down together, argues about which one goes over the fireplace, and pays for it in the same hour.
Upload the JPEGs straight from Lightroom Classic or Capture One. ProofRoom builds a dark gallery under your studio name, applies your watermark preset, sets a close date and writes the client a plain invitation you can edit.
One URL, no account to create, no app to install. The mother opens it on the couch, stars nine frames, forwards the same link to a grandmother in another state, and both sets of stars land in one shared list.
Your sizes, your products, your markup, your minimum. The client picks a 16x20 for the hallway and a set of wallets for the grandparents, pays by card, and the money settles into your studio account.
The order goes to your connected lab with the crop, the paper and the finish already specified. When the box ships, the tracking number appears in the same gallery link the family has been using all week.
Six things a proofing gallery has to do if it is going to replace your inbox, your notes app and the price list taped to the side of your monitor.
Stars from the mother, the father and the grandmother in Tulsa all collect in one list with a name beside each pick. Nobody has to agree in real time, and you never receive two conflicting shortlists again.
Set the retail price on every size, album and wall piece, and ProofRoom shows your cost, your markup and the take on a full order beside it. Duplicate a sheet for senior season, then raise it for the holidays without touching the old galleries.
Orders push to WHCC, Bay Photo, Miller's Lab, Nations Photo Lab and ProDPI with the crop, surface and mounting already attached. If you print in house instead, ProofRoom prints a pull sheet with the exact frames and sizes for your own queue.
Proofs carry your studio mark in a corner you choose, sized so it never sits on a face. The moment payment clears, ProofRoom swaps in the clean retouched file and releases the download the client paid for.
Every gallery gets a close date, and ProofRoom sends the reminder at day three, day ten and forty eight hours before it locks. You stop writing the polite follow up at eleven at night, and the family still gets their prints before the holidays.
Every open, every star, every price sheet view and every order line is written down with a time next to it. When a client is certain the gallery never arrived, you can see the four visits and six stars without turning it into an argument.
These figures come from 268 paying studios and the 41,900 galleries they delivered between January 2025 and December 2025. Drag the strip sideways to read them all.
$412
Median print order across all sessions in 2025, up from the $263 those same studios averaged on their last email based system. A price sheet the client can read beats a price list they have to ask for.
6 days
Median gap between the gallery going out and the order being placed, measured against 22 days before. Reminders at day three and day ten close the gap without a single phone call from you.
92%
Share of delivered galleries where a client stars at least one frame inside 72 hours. The star is one tap on a phone, so relatives who would never fill out a form still take part in choosing.
11 hrs
Average admin time given back per month, counted across list building, order typing and shipping questions. That is most of a shooting day back in a solo studio's calendar every single month.
Three studios, three very different books of work, one shared complaint about the way proofing used to run.
I used to keep a legal pad beside the monitor with file numbers scribbled on it. Now the family stars nine frames on a Sunday night and the order is waiting before I open Lightroom on Monday. Last fall I sold more wall art than in the two seasons before it, and I did not chase one person for a decision.
Senior season for me is 60 sessions in nine weeks, and the mothers are the ones who actually order. Giving them one link they can forward to a grandmother cut my ordering emails down to almost nothing. The day ten reminder does the work I used to do at eleven at night with a cold cup of coffee.
The part I did not expect to care about is the room log. A client was certain her gallery never arrived, and I could see four visits and six stars from her own phone. We laughed about it, she ordered the 16x20 that afternoon, and the whole thing took two minutes instead of two days.
ProofRoom never takes a percentage of what your clients spend. Pick the plan that matches how many sessions you shoot, and keep every dollar of markup you set.
One photographer shooting up to about 120 sessions a year.
$29 per month
Senior season, weekend family blocks and a retoucher on call.
$59 per month
Two shooters, an editor and someone running the front desk.
$119 per month
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from your studio settings. There is no setup fee, no charge per gallery, and no commission on your print sales. Storage over your plan limit is billed at $4 per 100 GB per month, and we tell you before it happens.
Six questions we get on nearly every call, answered the way we answer them on the phone.
Plans are $29, $59 or $119 per month depending on how many sessions you shoot and how many people work in the studio. ProofRoom never takes a percentage of an order, so the markup you set on a 16x20 is the markup you keep. Card processing on client orders is charged at the standard rate by your own payment provider, and that is the only other cost in the chain. If your volume swings between senior season and January, you can move between plans on any billing date.
Most studios deliver a real client gallery the same afternoon they sign up. The work is entering your price sheet, which takes about forty minutes for a typical list of prints, albums and wall pieces, and linking your lab account, which takes five. If you already keep a price list in a spreadsheet, we import it for you before your walkthrough call. After that, publishing a session is an upload and one review screen.
Proofs and finished files sit on encrypted storage in United States data centers, and every gallery link carries a token that only the people you send it to can use. You can add a passcode to any gallery, keep it out of search engines, and set it to lock on a date you choose. Clients never see another client's session, and our support staff do not open a studio gallery unless you ask us to look at a specific one. A full export of your originals, retouched files and order history is always one click away in settings.
Orders push straight to WHCC, Bay Photo, Miller's Lab, Nations Photo Lab and ProDPI with crop, surface and mounting carried across. Uploads come from Lightroom Classic, Capture One or a folder on your desktop, and file names stay intact so your catalog still lines up. If you print in house, ProofRoom prints a pull sheet listing frame numbers, sizes and finishes for your own queue. Bookkeeping exports run to CSV for QuickBooks or whoever does your taxes.
You can cancel from your studio settings on any day, and the plan simply runs to the end of the month you have already paid for. Delivered galleries stay open for thirty days after that so no family is cut off in the middle of an order. Before you leave, you can download every original, every retouched file and a complete order history as a ZIP archive. If you come back for the next senior season, your price sheets and lab settings are still waiting.
Ninety two percent of delivered galleries get at least one star inside 72 hours, and plenty of those stars come from grandparents on a five year old phone. There is no account to create, no password to remember and nothing to install, just a link that opens straight to the photographs at full width. Marking a favorite is one tap and it can be undone, so nobody is afraid of pressing the wrong thing. For families who would rather sit down with you, in person sales mode runs the same gallery on a projector while you write the order.
The Proof Sheet is our working notebook on craft, pricing and paperwork: lab paper, cropping for the wall, copyright filings, sales tax and what a print order really costs to deliver. Three of the newest pieces are below.
Group registration turns a season of sessions into one filing. Here is what published means for portrait work, which group option fits, and how the three month window protects your damages.
Paper surface decides how skin, hair and black clothing render on a wall. A working comparison of lustre, deep matte and metallic stocks, with the room conditions that make each one succeed or fail.
Most cropping damage happens before the shutter fires. Here are the framing, aspect ratio and resolution errors that appear only after a client orders big, and how to shoot so they never do.
Nine pieces, written from lab invoices, signed release forms and the ordering questions studios send us every season.
We will rebuild that exact session as a ProofRoom room, with your price sheet and your lab attached, and walk you through it while you watch.
Studios in every US time zone. Calls run 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Central, Monday to Friday.
One reply from a real person inside one business day. You can also write straight to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and attach a gallery link.
