Short links for a photographer — galleries, offer and contact in one place

Six months after one of the weddings I photographed, I received an SMS at 23:40. The bride: "Hey, where was that gallery of ours? I deleted the email while cleaning up my phone." And so there I was, sitting in bed, digging through my sent messages archive, finding that link to the cloud. Eighty-some characters. I copied, pasted, and sent. The next month, the same thing, just a different person and a different session.

At some point, it simply tired me out. And it dawned on me that the problem does not lie where I thought it did.

The gallery is fine. It's her address that is no good

Because galleries are usually well-managed. Pixieset, your own WordPress, a folder on cloud storage, whatever you prefer. The drama only begins when distributing the addresses. A raw link to the gallery can be something like this:

• sixty, sometimes one hundred and twenty characters, which in an SMS look like a phishing attempt,
• a session token in the middle, which you won't dictate over the phone or remember,
• and the best part: you change your hosting or move folders, and the old address simply fails. Except it is already on your business card and in the footer of every email. Dead.

A short link handles all three at once. But there is one thing that means more to a photographer than the length itself: the purpose of such a link is that you can change it whenever you want, while the address remains the same. For galleries that are migrating, expiring, or ending up in an archive, this changes everything.

Three links that you set up once and have peace of mind for years

Before you even start doing anything for a single client, create three branded links for yourself. You enter the suffix yourself, so let them be human-readable:

foto.cutty.dev/oferta      → aktualny cennik / pakiety
foto.cutty.dev/portfolio   → najlepsze realizacje
foto.cutty.dev/kontakt     → formularz albo prosto na WhatsApp

And with these three, you do it once and do it properly. For your business card, in your footer, in your Instagram bio, on the tag when printing. Did you raise your prices in January? Did you rework your portfolio after a major project? Just swap the destination and that's it. /oferta still points to that price list, not to the PDF you made in 2024 and forgot about long ago. You can do this in any decent URL shortener; I personally use cutty.dev, because changing the destination there is just one click.

Client galleries — stick to one pattern

For single sessions, I recommend one naming convention, mainly so you don't get lost yourself after the fiftieth gallery:

foto.cutty.dev/kowalscy-wesele
foto.cutty.dev/nowak-chrzest
foto.cutty.dev/firmaxyz-event

The client gets something that reads like an address, rather than a handful of random characters after a question mark. Will they come back after two years for extra prints? They will give it to you from memory or find it in an email in three seconds.

QR on the album. This is where it gets interesting

In my opinion, this is exactly where short links for photographers do the most work. You are putting together an album or making a print for an exhibition and you want the viewer to be able to glance at the entire gallery. You provide a QR code. Just encode a short, replaceable link in it, rather than a raw cloud address. This is the moment where people roll their eyes.

Think of it this way. A QR code printed in an album is unchangeable. The client has it on their shelf. If you embedded a direct link to the gallery there, and a year later you moved the files, then the QR leads to nowhere and there's nothing you can do about it. The album left your hands long ago. But if you used a short link, you can redirect the destination on your end, and the same print continues to work. That is the difference between a QR as a pretty decoration and a QR that actually does something.

Did the client even look?

You know that hesitation before writing "so how, do you like them?". You don't know if he even opened the gallery. If he didn't open it, you'll come across as a nuisance.

In the panel, you see the number of visits and roughly when they occurred. Without details, without names, but enough to know that the link is alive and someone has looked there. And here is one thing that is indisputable for me: these clicks are counted from a hashed IP, without building a profile of the person on the other side. We operate on snapshots of people, often very private ones. It is difficult to sell discretion at a wedding session and then pass those same guests through a shortener that tracks them around the clock. It would simply be contradictory.

And since the data resides on servers within the EU, when you sign a contract with some company for an event, you have a clear conscience regarding where the addresses of their employees' galleries are circulating. A small detail, but it can come in handy with a B2B invoice.

Entire session, step by step

1. You upload the gallery where you always do.
2. You shorten the address to foto.cutty.dev/nazwisko-typ.
3. If it is an album or a print, you turn that link into a QR code.
4. You send the client a short link. SMS, email, doesn't matter.
5. After delivering the prints, you switch the gallery's target to an archival or lower resolution version. The address remains the same.

Five steps. And that's the end of dead links on business cards and albums that you distributed long ago.

Honestly? If I had introduced this three years earlier, I would have saved myself dozens of evening SMS messages about lost galleries. Start with these three fixed suffixes. The rest will come naturally.