Delivery count planner
Set the session length and your own shooting pace, and get a delivered-image range you can defend, the editing hours behind it, and a sentence ready for your contract.
Free, no account, nothing to install. Your answers stay in your browser.
From roughly 270 frames shot. Promise the bottom of the range and deliver the top of it, never the other way round.
For your contract or booking page
You will receive between 40 and 60 edited images, delivered within 2 weeks of the session.
Why a range beats a number
The question clients ask is "how many photos will I get", and the honest answer is that it depends on how the session goes. But "it depends" loses bookings, so you need a figure. The way out is a range you can hit every time: promise the bottom of it, deliver the top of it, and the expectation never becomes a complaint.
Over-promising is asymmetric. Delivering 90 images against a promise of 100 reads as a shortfall even though it is a generous gallery. Delivering 85 against a promise of 60 to 80 reads as a bonus. Same photographs, opposite conversations.
The two numbers that decide everything
Frames per hour and keeper rate. Everything else in this tool is arithmetic on top of them. The defaults are typical working figures per session type, but yours will differ, possibly by a lot, and the fix takes ten minutes: open your last three galleries, note the delivered count, compare it to the shot count in your catalogue, and you have your real keeper rate.
Photographers consistently guess high on keeper rate and low on editing minutes. Both errors push in the same direction, which is why the delivery promise in a contract so often turns into a weekend that was supposed to be free.
What the gallery size is for
The gallery size figure is there because storage is what you will actually be billed for. Multiply it by the number of sessions you shoot in a year and you have the storage input for the gallery platform cost calculator, which will tell you what that costs on each platform.
A note on black and white
Delivering a black and white version of every image roughly doubles the gallery and the delivered count, but not the work: a second export from an existing edit is a preset, not a new edit. The planner charges it at a quarter of the editing time rather than double. It is still worth asking whether clients want it, because a gallery of 160 images where 80 are duplicates is harder to choose from than one with 80.
Common questions
- How many photos should I deliver from a one hour portrait session?
- Most portrait photographers land somewhere between 20 and 50 edited images from an hour of shooting. The planner defaults to about 180 frames an hour with a 20% keeper rate, which produces a range in that band. The exact number matters less than picking one and putting it in writing.
- How many photos from a full wedding day?
- On the planner’s wedding defaults, an eight to ten hour day works out at roughly 350 to 650 delivered images. That is a wide band because coverage style varies enormously. Set the frames per hour and keeper rate to your own numbers and it tightens considerably.
- Should I promise a number at all?
- Promise a range, and promise the bottom of it. A client who was told 60 to 80 and receives 85 is delighted. A client who was told 100 and receives 90 feels short-changed, even though they got more photos. The cost of over-promising is entirely one-sided.
- What is a keeper rate?
- The share of frames that survive culling. If you shot 600 frames and delivered 120, your keeper rate is 20%. It is the single most useful number in this tool, and measuring it takes ten minutes: count the delivered images from your last three sessions and divide by the shot count. Enter that and every figure on the page becomes yours rather than a typical range.
- Why does the editing estimate look so high?
- Because it usually is. Three minutes an image sounds trivial until you multiply it by 120 images, at which point culling and editing one portrait session is a six hour job. If that number is a surprise, the effective hourly rate calculator is the uncomfortable follow-up.
The number is the easy part
Delivering it is the rest of the job. Xposure galleries take a folder of exports and turn them into a client-ready gallery with PIN access, proofing and downloads, on the free tier included.
See a gallery5 more free tools for photographers are on the tools index: gallery platform cost calculator, package builder, effective hourly rate, cancellation policy generator and portfolio speed check.