A lot of photographers deliver beautiful work through a gallery whose own logo is bigger than theirs. The client clicks a link, lands on a page branded for someone else's company, downloads their photos from that company's domain, and walks away having interacted with two brands instead of one. You did the work. Half the trust went somewhere else.
This is not really about vanity. It is about what a client remembers a year later when a friend asks who shot their wedding. If the last thing they touched was your name, they say your name. If it was a gallery platform's name, you are relying on them to remember past it.
Whose name is actually on the door
Start with the domain the client sees at checkout and download, not just the one on your homepage. Plenty of "custom domain" features only cover your public portfolio and quietly drop the client back onto a vendor subdomain the moment they open a private gallery. Open a real gallery link on a phone, scroll to the very bottom, and read every line of small print. If the platform's name shows up anywhere the client can see, that plan is not actually unbranded, whatever the pricing page called it.
Check what "unlimited" really means
"Unlimited storage" and "unlimited galleries" are two different promises, and plenty of plans only make one of them. A single wedding gallery of 800 edited images at roughly 15MB each is about 12GB. Shoot 20 weddings a year and you are past 200GB before you touch a second season. If a plan caps storage while calling galleries unlimited, you will hit that wall quietly, usually right before a big delivery, and find out the fix is an upsell.
Who gets the client's attention after delivery
Some platforms use the moment a client opens their gallery to sell that client something else, an account signup, a competing photographer's ad, a "powered by" banner with its own call to action. None of that is hostile exactly, but it is not neutral either. Every one of those touches is a small tax on the attention that should be entirely on your work and your name.
What happens when they buy prints
If you sell digital downloads or prints through the gallery, look past the subscription price to the commission on the sale itself. A platform can be cheap monthly and expensive per sale, and the sale is where your real money is. Ask directly: on a $300 print order, how much lands in your account after the platform takes its cut, not counting standard payment processing.
The one test that settles it
Before you commit, run one gallery all the way through as if you were the client: open the link, browse the photos, favorite a few, buy something, download the rest. If your name is the only name you see from the first click to the receipt in your inbox, the platform passed. If a vendor name appears even once, that is the real answer, not whatever the pricing page promises.
That single walkthrough tells you more than any feature list. This is exactly the kind of default a platform built specifically for photographers, like Xposure, ships with rather than sells as an upgrade: white-label, unbranded galleries on every paid plan, with a fully custom domain on the higher tiers for photographers who want their own URL too. Whichever platform you choose, make your clients' last impression be you.