Kept

For photography studios

Delivered today. Kept forever.

Kept delivers this season's galleries the week you shoot them, and keeps every season before them alive at the same link, on storage priced for the way galleries are actually used.

Ask for an invitation In private preview with founding studios.

The thing nobody prices correctly

A gallery has a lifecycle. Your host charges as if it doesn't.

Week one

The link lands and the gallery is hammered: every family, every grandparent, every download, inside about ten days.

Month three

It goes quiet. Not deleted, not unwanted, just finished. It will be opened twice more in its life, and both times it will matter enormously.

Year five

You are still paying week-one rates on it, and on the four hundred galleries behind it. That bill is what eventually forces the decision.

So the industry makes you flinch: galleries that expire, catalogs force-archived out from under you, retention sold back as an add-on, a storage ladder that gets steeper exactly as your business grows. Every one of those is a billing structure, not a technical limit.

Kept moves a gallery onto archive storage once its season is over and leaves it browsable: the pages, the covers and the thumbnails stay instant, so a client from 2019 still opens their link and still sees their photographs. Full resolution comes back on request: the family asks, you approve, it returns. Nothing expires. Nothing is deleted to save money.

Built on the hard case first

One recital is not one gallery.

A showcase is forty acts and four thousand frames, and no family wants 3,997 of them. In Kept an event nests as deep as it actually goes (show, act, number, dancer), and every level is a real page with its own permanent link, its own cover and its own share preview. A family opens the two acts their kid is in.

Long-form video rides along as links, kept beside the photographs it belongs with. The stream stays where you already put it, and Kept never charges the family for it. Photographs are what Kept holds.

Portrait sessions, teams and weddings use the same shape, just shallower. There is no separate mode to learn.

What the family gets

One link, no account, and it still works in 2031.

  • No signup, no app, no password. A link, and a code if you want one. Grandparents manage it.
  • Print-resolution originals, unwatermarked. The whole gallery as a zip or a single frame, byte-identical to the file you exported. Set a watermark and it stays where it belongs: on the images being browsed, never on what the family takes home.
  • Links are permanent from the moment they're minted. Rename the collection, reorganize the whole event, move a gallery three levels, and the link you already texted still lands.
  • Your name on it, not ours. Galleries live at your own address and lead with your studio. Kept is a line in the footer.
  • Private by default, and specific about it. Public, code-required, or unlisted, chosen per collection, and it drives everything downstream, including what a link preview is willing to show and whether search engines may index it at all.

Where this actually stands

Early, and honest about which parts.

Kept is in private preview. It is delivering real recitals and real portrait sessions this season: mine first, then a small number of founding studios. It is not a launched product with a support team, and the point of an invitation is that I want to hear what breaks.

Working now

  • Galleries, nested events, uploads
  • Permanent share links with previews
  • Privacy and access codes
  • Free full-resolution downloads and zips, unless a studio sells them
  • Selling photo downloads and gallery access
  • Archive storage with restore-on-request
  • Watermarks on what families view
  • Video organized alongside as links

Not built yet

  • Selling prints (a studio can price them, nothing ships yet)
  • Self-serve signup (studios are set up by hand)
  • Multiple logins per studio
  • Importing a back catalog from another host
  • Client-facing name search

Founding studios

Come break it with some real galleries.

Founding studios get set up by hand, get me on the other end of an email, and get a say in what gets built next; the roadmap is currently written out of what actual delivery weeks turn up.

One reply from a person. No list, no sequence, no sharing your address with anyone.