Compress Multiple Photos for Gallery Delivery

A full wedding gallery runs between 400 and 800 edited photos by the time you finish export in Lightroom. Each photo at full quality is 8 to 15 MB, which makes the total gallery something between 3 and 12 GB. Uploading that to Dropbox on home internet takes hours. Uploading it to Pixieset or Shootproof takes even longer because those platforms re-encode on their side. Every minute you spend waiting on an upload is a minute you are not editing the next wedding.

Most photographers solve this by exporting a second set from Lightroom at 80 percent JPEG quality and longer-edge 3000 pixels. That works, but it means keeping two sets of files on your drive, managing two export presets, and hoping you do not accidentally deliver the small set to the client or the large set to Instagram. This tool replaces that step with a single batch compression pass on your finished exports, so you keep one master set and generate delivery-ready versions on demand.

The compression is tuned for the kinds of scenes weddings produce: outdoor ceremonies with green foliage, candle-lit reception dances, tight couple portraits with blurred backgrounds, and detail shots of rings and florals. Generic compressors destroy the tonal gradations in low-light reception shots. This path preserves the shadow detail that makes the mood readable, while still hitting the file-size targets that make delivery painless.

For Dropbox delivery at viewing quality, 85 percent JPEG at 3000 pixels longest edge is the standard. Clients viewing on 5K iMacs will not notice the compression. Clients viewing on phones definitely will not. Total gallery size drops from 8 GB to about 1.5 GB, which uploads in roughly 20 minutes on decent home fiber instead of 4 hours.

For Pixieset or Shootproof, the platform's own compression will hit you twice if you upload originals. Pre-compress to 90 percent quality and 4000 pixels, then let their platform do its pass. The combined result is cleaner than letting the platform handle your full-quality uploads, because platform compression is aggressive on unknown image content while this tool's pass is gentle and informed.

For print-ready files that clients will order from your print shop, do not compress at all. This tool is for delivery to online galleries, not for finished print files. Keep your original 300 DPI exports separate and only compress the viewing set.