The pen drive, and why it survives
Handing over a pen drive or a portable hard disk is still the default for Indian wedding delivery, and there are honest reasons for that. The client gets a physical object. It feels like a finished product, it photographs well in a delivery box, and older family members understand it immediately. Some photographers price the drive into the package and hand it over at a small ceremony.
The problems are all downstream. A 64GB drive costs you ₹400 to ₹1,500, and you buy one per client forever. The courier is another trip and another thing to chase. When the drive fails in eighteen months, and some of them do, the client calls you, not the manufacturer, and expects you to still have the files. You have no idea whether anyone ever opened it. And when the bride's sister in Dubai wants the photos, someone has to copy 40GB and upload it anyway, which is the exact problem you were avoiding.
If your clients want a drive, keep giving them one. The strongest setup is usually both: a drive for the shelf and a link for everyone who is not in the room.
Google Drive, WeTransfer and WhatsApp
The free-tools route is where most photographers go next, and it works right up until it does not.
- Google Drive is storage, not delivery. Sharing permissions confuse clients, the mobile app makes bulk download genuinely hard for a non-technical parent, and your 15GB free quota is gone after two weddings. Paid storage starts around ₹130 per month for 100GB as of July 2026, and it keeps billing forever because the old galleries never leave.
- WeTransfer links expire, usually within a week on the free tier. A client who opens the email on their honeymoon comes back to a dead link and messages you at 11pm.
- WhatsApp destroys the photos. It recompresses everything, so a carefully graded 25MB export arrives as a few hundred kilobytes. It is fine for a teaser. It is not delivery, and clients who only ever saw the WhatsApp version think that is what your work looks like.
- A shared folder of raw JPEGs also skips the part where you control what the client sees first. There is no proofing step, no watermark, no order.
The deeper cost is professional, not technical. A Drive folder link looks exactly like every other Drive folder link the client has ever received. Nothing about it says a professional delivered this.
The gallery link
A client gallery fixes the specific things the other two get wrong: it opens on any phone with no signup, it survives being forwarded to twelve relatives, it downloads in bulk in one tap, and it looks like your studio rather than like a file server.
The catch has always been the price. Most gallery platforms are American, billed in dollars on a monthly subscription, which is a strange thing to pay through the six months a year you are not shooting weddings. That is the gap Lensdrop was built for: you pay once per gallery, in rupees, when you create it. Small 5GB is ₹149, Standard 15GB is ₹399, Large 30GB is ₹799, XL 50GB is ₹1,299, and two free galleries at 15GB each come with the account. Payment is UPI or an Indian card through Razorpay.
The delivery itself: drag the folder in, uploads resume if your connection drops mid-wedding, share one link with a 6-digit PIN. Clients view watermarked previews while the couple is still choosing, then you flip downloads on and they pull clean full-resolution originals, one photo or the whole set.
Side by side
| Cost to you | What breaks | |
|---|---|---|
| Pen drive | ₹400 to ₹1,500 per client, plus courier | Drive failures, no remote access, no delivery record |
| Google Drive | From about ₹130 per month, forever | Permissions, painful mobile bulk download, quota creep |
| WeTransfer | Free tier, or a monthly plan | Links expire, no proofing, no branding |
| Free | Compression destroys the files you spent nights editing | |
| Gallery link | ₹149 to ₹1,299 once per gallery on Lensdrop | Nothing, until the 6 month window closes and you extend or archive |
A delivery checklist that avoids the usual mess
- Deliver a teaser within 48 hours. Ten to fifteen frames while the wedding is still the only thing anyone is talking about. This is the one job WhatsApp is good at.
- Proof before you deliver. Send the full set watermarked with downloads off so the couple can shortlist album photos without every cousin grabbing 40GB first.
- Set a PIN and tell the couple to share it, not to forward screenshots. One link, one PIN, the whole family.
- Turn downloads on once the album is locked. Then the clean originals go out in a single bulk download.
- Say the expiry date out loud, twice. Galleries stay live for six months on Lensdrop, extendable in 3 month blocks. Tell them in the handover message and again a month before it closes.
- Keep your own backup regardless. No delivery platform is your archive, this one included.
More on the wedding workflow in photo delivery for wedding photographers. Rupee prices and the UPI details are on the India page, and the platform-by-platform comparison is in client gallery software in India.