Picflow Review | Professional Client Gallery & Proofing Service

Gone are the days of CDs, DVDs and USBs as methods of gallery delivery to clients.

These days, the majority of creative professionals who are “with the times” are delivering their final product by way of an online cloud gallery service.

While there are several different online gallery providers out there these days, few offer nearly as intuitive a client collaboration component as Picflow does.

For those who are seeking an online gallery service that not only encompasses the ability to send multiple images but also allows you to join forces with your clients on the photo proofing process as well, Picflow is exactly what you’re looking for.

Picflow Review: What is Picflow?

Picflow is a highly customizable and aesthetically pleasing client gallery delivery tool.

Not only does Picflow help us transfer images, but it also includes a collaborative image-proofing component geared toward modern photographers and creative professionals alike.

In laymen’s terms, it’s a tool that allows your clients to provide feedback on images in the galleries you send them.

While most competitor online gallery services offer favoriting functions, Picflow offers comments, flags, color labels, and even annotations as well.

Picflow Features

There’s a huge array of cool things you can do with Picflow, but I’ve chosen to focus on the following features that I found most impressive and useful:

• Gallery Designer

Picflow’s extremely customizable gallery designer gives you the power to quickly and easily create new galleries, switch the title and cover photo, change up the layout, and split your images into different sections.

There are also image controls that enable you to adjust image sizes and spacing at the wave of a slider.

• Review and approval tools

For some creatives, it’s extremely valuable to have more of a collaborative environment with their clients prior to final delivery of the images.

Picflow stands out as a powerful client proofing service. Clients can not only select their favorite images, but they can leave comments, approve/reject photos, and assign color labels.

I love that each image has its own devoted chat thread complete with emojis for leaving comments. This thread also contains action history – you can see that I added a green label to the image at first, then later changed the label color to red.

And since every shoot is different, Picflow’s review tools can be enabled or disabled individually for each gallery.

• Annotations

Annotations are technically another part of the proofing component, but I felt this feature needed its own devoted write-up because it’s just so cool.

Clients can literally draw feedback and write their ideas or needs directly onto the image.

The best part is there are circle, line and arrow drawing functions built right in for those of us who are dreadful illustrators. And, the intuitive interface makes it easy even for those who aren’t tech-savvy.

If Picflow wasn’t already compelling enough, this unique proofing feature truly sets it apart from its competitors.

I can think of so many situations in my day-to-day life as a commercial photographer where this would come in handy, and I’m really wishing the service I currently use had this feature.

• Feedback tracking

You can easily review whether or not someone has viewed, downloaded or reviewed a given image.

• Unthrottled upload and download speeds

Swiftly upload and download files regardless of your Picflow plan. No matter which one you choose, your speeds will remain unthrottled, making it easier to deliver images to clients on time.

• Advanced Mode

Tap into a series of even more powerful tools with Advanced Mode. These include review filters, multi-selection, bulk editing, export tools, and so many more that the list would be too awkwardly long to fit in a single sentence.

• What’s next for Picflow?

Picflow is a relatively new client proofing service and gallery platform that’s still being developed. Upcoming features include:

• Invite your team and collaborators to manage galleries together.
• Lightroom plugin for simplified uploading and syncing.
• Watermarking to protect all your images.
• Sell prints and digital downloads directly from your galleries.

Overall Performance

Picflow was so quick and easy to use that I barely had time to blink before my test gallery was created and ready to go.

All I had to do was sign in with Google, and boom. It automatically brought in my information and even my profile picture for me.

I uploaded 140 gigantic high-resolution photos from an R5 in under two minutes on my fiber WiFi connection.

Not to mention that the customization features are built right into your gallery editor and require no digging around through different tabs.

And did I mention unthrottled speeds? No matter what plan you have with Picflow, your upload/download speeds will remain the same.

Alternatives to Picflow

• Shootproof: An all-in-one online gallery, client delivery and management service that also handles invoices in a basic way too.
• Pixieset: The app I personally use to deliver images to clients. While Pixieset does include quite a few different subscription plans that go above and beyond (e.g. a client management system, websites, etc.), client proofing can only be performed using favorites. I find the lack of filtering options to be challenging when it comes to my commercial clients who generally need more retouching done. See our Pixieset review.
• Pic-Time: Another very popular client delivery service that a lot of wedding photographers use. But like Pixieset, the extensive collaborative proofing functions are just not there.
• Filestage: I’ve never used this tool, but I found it while researching tools similar to Picflow. While Filestage does have collaborative proofing features for both photo and video, it seems quite a bit more complex and more of a B2B solution.

How Much Does Picflow Cost?

At around US$15 dollars a month for their top plan, Picflow offers quite a robust service and amount of storage for the price.

Competitors typically charge around $25 or more for this amount of space and have way less to offer in the way of collaborative features.

The base storage starts with 1TB but Picflow wants its customers to have the choice to extend their storage in 250 GB increments for only $2 (which is extremely cheap compared to other services). This way, photographers who only upload smaller JPGs don’t have to pay for lots of unused storage.

Picflow Review | Final Recommendations

Picflow should be strongly considered as your photo delivery service if client feedback is a major component of your photography business.

The ability for clients to communicate specific needs by drawing and annotating images is a major selling point of the app. The additional filtering options, labels, colors, etc. are the cherry on top.

For wedding and portrait photographers, all the bells and whistles Picflow has to offer may not be necessary.

And with no built-in print service, Picflow is better suited for commercial creators who rely solely on digital product delivery.

However, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a beautiful tool for showcasing and delivering all types of digital visual assets to clients.

Despite being a comparatively new client-proofing service on the scene, Picflow is shaking up the market thanks to its unique features.

It gives you the tools necessary to help manage and receive feedback from higher caliber clients that have more specific needs in a way that many other services do not. And, at a price you just can’t beat!

I hope you found this Picflow review helpful. If you decide to try it out, let us know in the comments how it goes for you.