A single RAW file from a modern mirrorless camera runs 25–100 MB. A wedding shoot produces thousands of them. Delivering that to a client — or handing off to a retoucher — regularly means moving 50 to 500 GB, which instantly disqualifies email, WhatsApp, and every free tier of every store-and-forward service. Here's how working photographers actually solve delivery.

The delivery options photographers juggle

Client galleries (Pixieset, Pic-Time, SmugMug): beautiful for presenting finished JPEGs, and the right tool for that job. But gallery plans meter storage, and they're not designed for RAW handoff to editors.

Cloud drives: a shared Drive or Dropbox folder works until you do the math on storage tiers — hundreds of gigabytes of active shoots means a paid plan that keeps growing.

Shipping a hard drive: still common for terabyte-scale archives, and honestly reasonable at that size. Slow, costs money, drives get lost.

Direct P2P transfer: for the everyday case — "get this shoot to this person today" — streaming the files directly is the fastest free option, with no storage bill because nothing is stored.

Delivering a shoot with ZetaShare

ZetaShare transfers files browser-to-browser over an encrypted connection, with no size cap:

  1. Export or collect the shoot into one folder and zip it. (Zipping bundles the files; RAW compresses little, and that's fine — there's no size limit to squeeze under.)
  2. Open ZetaShare and drop the archive in.
  3. Set a password — client shoots are private material — and copy the link.
  4. Send link and password to your client or retoucher (separately, ideally).
  5. The transfer streams directly to them at full quality. Nothing is uploaded to any server, re-compressed, or retained.

A 100 GB wedding delivery over a decent connection completes in a couple of hours — see our transfer time table.

Why "no re-compression" matters more for images than anything

Photographers live in the gap between an original file and a degraded copy. Messaging apps and some sharing pipelines re-encode images to save bandwidth — invisible for a meme, fatal for print work. A direct P2P stream is byte-for-byte: the DNG or CR3 that arrives is bit-identical to the one you exported. Same for 16-bit TIFFs and PSDs with layers intact.

Privacy angle: client work stays client work

Unpublished shoots are confidential by default — commercial embargoes, private events, unreleased products. With direct transfer there is no third-party server holding a copy of your client's wedding or your NDA'd campaign. The files move from your machine to theirs, encrypted with DTLS 1.3, and the pipe closes.

FAQ

Can I send an entire 300 GB archive? Yes — there's no cap. For very large sends, use ethernet and disable sleep on both machines.

Should I deliver RAW or JPEG to clients? That's a business decision (many photographers deliver edited JPEGs and archive RAW). Whichever you choose, the transfer method no longer forces the answer.

Does the client need an account or software? No — they open your link in a browser and receive the files. That's the entire client experience.

Deliver your next shoot at full resolution: start a transfer.