Photo Proof Pro is a proofing gallery SaaS platform for professional photographers. Photographers create password-protected galleries from their photo sessions and share them with their clients, then manage their clients, galleries, and orders from a single dashboard. Clients log into their gallery, choose their favorites, build their own selection lists, and place orders directly through the platform.
Photo Proof Pro is owned and run entirely by me. That includes the application itself running on Drupal, the Recurly subscription billing, the Node.js services that handle image processing, and the AWS infrastructure underneath it all.
How It Started
Photo Proof Pro began years ago as a standalone proofing tool I built for Peter Hurley to deliver and sell his headshot work. As students from Headshot Crew started asking how they could use something similar for their own sessions, I converted it into a multi-tenant SaaS platform so any photographer could sign up and run their own proofing workflow on top of it. It's since opened up to anyone looking for a simple, reliable online photo proofing solution.
How It Works
Photographers sign up for one of three subscription tiers and use the platform as the post-session delivery and ordering tool for their clients. They create a record for each client, build a gallery from their photo session, upload images, and choose how the gallery should behave, including watermarking, download permissions, ordering options, and pricing.
Their clients then access the galleries to view their proofs, place orders for prints and products the photographer has enabled, and download images when allowed. The platform serves two distinct user types, paying photographers and their non-paying customers, and the experience is tuned for both.
Image Processing
Watermarking and bulk image downloads are handled by custom Node.js services that sit alongside the Drupal application. Drupal manages the data, accounts, and orders. Node handles the heavy image operations, applying watermarks at delivery time and packaging selected images into ZIP downloads, so neither side becomes a bottleneck.
Infrastructure
Everything runs on AWS. Originals, watermarked variants, and ZIP downloads are stored on S3. The rest of the stack (application servers, database, and supporting services) also runs on AWS.