PhotoProofPro 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.
PhotoProofPro 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
PhotoProofPro began as a standalone proofing tool I built for Peter Hurley to deliver and sell his headshot work. The proofing process became central to Peter's workflow, so as Headshot Crew grew, I rebuilt the original code into a SaaS application, first releasing it to our members, then to the general public. At the time, there were very few online proofing platforms on the market.
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.