Client photos on your phone: protecting them as a working photographer

A wedding client texts you at 9 p.m.: “Could you send me that one from the first dance?” You open your phone, and it is a mix. Pictures of the client’s family sit next to your dog, your lunch and your own kids’ birthday.

Clients hand photographers their faces, their children and their homes. You aren’t a bank, but they still expect you to take care of what you hold. This is general guidance, not legal advice, and what you owe a client depends on your contract and local law.

What to do now

Read your contract. Many contracts say how long you keep a client’s files and who may see them. Follow it. If it says nothing, decide on a rule and tell clients.

Keep client work apart from personal photos. Don’t let a shoot’s photos mix with your personal gallery. Use a separate folder or project at the least.

Turn off automatic sync for client work. If your phone’s gallery syncs to a personal cloud account, client photos may follow. That can break a promise of confidentiality, and it puts copies in a place you may share with family.

Keep your originals on a backup you control. The card, a drive and a second copy somewhere else. A phone is a poor place to hold the only copy.

Use a strong lock and keep it short-lived. A long PIN or passphrase, auto-lock on, and no lock-screen previews of client messages.

Strip what you don’t need to send. Photos can carry location and other details. Learn how in removing location from photos.

Deliver through the right channel. Use your delivery tool for finished work. Don’t send whole sets through casual chat, where the copy lives in a thread.

Delete on schedule. When the agreement ends, delete client files from your phone, your backups and the deleted folder, and tell the client you have.

Keep paperwork safe too. Contracts, model releases and ID copies need the same care. See storing ID and passport scans safely.

What not to rely on

• Believing “it’s just my phone”. It also holds your family, your messages and your accounts, all open when you hand it over.
• A hidden folder in the gallery. It opens with the phone’s unlock, and sync often copies it anyway.
• Renaming a folder to the client’s initials. It’s tidy, not private.
• Deleting from the gallery only. The deleted folder and your cloud copy still hold the photo.

Where a vault helps

Silo keeps the photos on your phone in an encrypted vault with its own PIN, passphrase or face or fingerprint lock, so client photos aren’t in the gallery your family flips through. Albums can hold one client each, and favorites mark the picks. On Pro, contracts and releases can sit beside them as files. Everything is encrypted on the phone before it’s stored, and Silo checks each import before you remove the original from your gallery. The first step is moving photos into a vault safely.

A free vault holds up to 100 photos and 10 videos, which suits a handful of jobs, not an archive. Pro has no such limits. Either way, Silo isn’t built for professional delivery, so it doesn’t make client galleries or links. It also has no sync, so it isn’t your archive.