4 live commercial photography portfolios
Every one is a live site run by a photographer shooting for brands. Browse them, then build yours.
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Every commercial photography website example below is a live site, run by a photographer shooting for brands, not a mockup or a best-of pick. Filter by sector, or scroll and see what stops you.
Ideas
Seven things that hold up across every commercial portfolio worth the scroll.
Show fewer pieces than you want to
The instinct is to prove range. The effect is to dilute it. Six pieces you would defend in a meeting beat twenty you would explain.
Lead with one strong image, not a menu
A visitor decides whether to keep scrolling before they read anything. Give that decision one image to work with, not a list of options.
Put contact one click from everywhere
Every page needs a way to reach you that does not require going back to the top. Footer, sticky header, end of each project. Somewhere.
Own the domain
A portfolio on someone else's subdomain reads as a trial. Your own domain costs less than a coffee a month and it is the first thing an art buyer notices.
Name the nav after the categories an art buyer briefs
Product, food, automotive, interiors, people on location. Not Gallery One and Gallery Two. A buyer arrives looking for one category and leaves if they have to hunt for it.
Group by campaign, not by shoot date
Anyone hiring you needs to see that you hold one look across a whole set. Chronological order proves you own a camera. Campaign order proves you can be briefed.
Keep each set tight and consistent
Fifteen frames that hold a single look sell better than forty that show range. The set is the unit a buyer judges, not the site.
Examples
A portfolio that only shows work is doing half a job. The pieces below run on the same subscription, so a site can take money and hand over files without a second platform behind it.
Sell prints and downloads with zero commission
The store handles physical prints and digital files natively through Stripe and PayPal. Pixpa takes no commission on any sale, so the only cut is the payment processor's. For a photographer with a steady print or download line, that difference covers the subscription several times over in a year.
Deliver selects and approvals from the same domain
Client galleries handle the round that sits between the shoot and the invoice: a private link, password protection, favouriting, ratings, expiry dates, full-resolution download. They run inside the same subscription as the portfolio, so the link you send an agency lives on the same domain as the work that won you the brief.
Publish the brief, not just the final frame
How a shot was solved is what gets a commercial photographer hired twice. Lighting diagram, set build, the constraint the client did not mention until the day. The built-in blog covers that without a second content system, and every post carries its own SEO fields.
FAQs
Everything else you might want to know before you start. Still curious? Live chat is open 24/7.
A commercial photography portfolio is organised by category rather than by date: product, food, automotive, interiors, people on location. Each category holds a tight, consistent set rather than a whole shoot. There is usually a client list, a contact route on every page, and no news feed on the front. The site is built to be scanned in under a minute by someone deciding whether to send a brief.
Working commercial portfolios tend to run 40 to 80 images across the whole site, split into category sets of 12 to 20. The number that matters is the one per set, not the one per site. A buyer looking for food work judges you on the food set alone, so a weak frame inside a set costs more than a category you have left out.
Commercial work is made to sell a product or a service and is licensed by a brand or an agency. Editorial work is made to accompany a story and is licensed by a publication. The difference matters to a portfolio because the two are briefed by different buyers, so photographers who shoot both usually keep them in separate sets rather than mixing them into one gallery.
Yes, as its own named category rather than mixed into a general gallery. Product photography is one of the briefs a commercial buyer places, alongside food, automotive and interiors. A named set means someone looking for a product shooter finds that work without scrolling past campaign images.
Most do, because commercial delivery runs on selects and approval rounds rather than one final file. Client galleries handle that round with an agency or a brand: a private link, password protection, favouriting, ratings, expiry dates and full-resolution download. On Pixpa they sit inside the same subscription as the portfolio, so the delivery link runs on the same domain as the work that won the job.
Yes. The Pixpa store handles prints and digital downloads through Stripe and PayPal, with zero commission on the sale. That covers print sales, stock-style downloads and digital products such as presets or LUTs. Pixpa does not include a rights-managed licensing module, so usage licences are still negotiated and invoiced outside the platform.
Get Started
Running the site on one platform and the client galleries on another is the arrangement most commercial photographers end up with. This is the one subscription that covers both, with no commission on anything you sell.
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