What to do with your gallery once it lands in your inbox
A professional Paris session delivers high-resolution, print-ready files, and the best thing you can do with them is get them off a screen and into an album. This guide covers the album formats that work best for professionally edited portraits, what to look for in print quality, how to choose images from your gallery, and what the different display options mean in practice. It is written for anyone who has booked, or is planning to book, a Paris session and wants their photos to exist beyond a phone folder.
Your gallery arrives within 24 hours. The editing is done. The files are yours, with a full print licence included. What happens next is up to you, and the choices you make at that point determine whether your Paris photos live on a wall for decades or get forgotten in a downloads folder.
Every session delivers high-resolution digital files with a print licence included. High-resolution means the files contain enough pixel data to print cleanly at large sizes, typically up to A2 and beyond without visible quality loss. This is the starting point for everything that follows. A low-resolution file, such as a compressed social media export or a screenshot, will look soft or pixelated when printed above a small size. The files delivered from a professional session will not have that problem.
Before you order any print product, confirm you are working from the original downloaded files and not from a version that has been compressed by a messaging app or email client. Download directly from the online gallery, save to a dedicated folder, and work from there. That one step prevents the most common print disappointment: a beautifully edited image that comes back looking flat because a lower-resolution copy was sent to the lab.
TipDownload your gallery files to a computer or external drive before ordering prints. Do not print from a phone screenshot or a file forwarded through a messaging app.
| Package | Price | Duration | Photos | Locations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | €300 | 1 hour | 30 photos | 1 location |
| Signature | €500 | 2 hours | 50 photos | 2 locations |
| Prestige | €800 | 3 hours | 60 photos | 3 locations |
There are three formats worth knowing: layflat albums, standard photo books, and traditional slip-in albums. Layflat albums are the strongest choice for portrait and couple photography. The pages open completely flat, so a two-page spread has no crease or gutter running through the middle of a face. This matters most for horizontal compositions, wide landscape shots at the Eiffel Tower, or any image where the key detail sits in the centre of the frame. Standard photo books use a sewn or glued binding that causes pages to curve at the spine, which can obscure content near the centre. They work well for smaller images or heavily designed layouts but are less suited to full-bleed portrait spreads. Slip-in albums, where individual prints slide into clear pockets, preserve each photo as a standalone print and are easy to update over time.
For Paris session photos, layflat is the professional standard. The seamless double-page spread suits the wide, architectural frames that Paris locations produce naturally. A photo taken looking down Avenue de Camoëns toward the Eiffel Tower, or a couple framed against the steel columns of Pont de Bir-Hakeim, benefits from a full-spread print that a standard photo book binding would interrupt.
TipOrder a layflat album if your session included any wide two-location spreads. The gutter in a standard binding will run through the centre of any full-width image.
Paper finish changes how an edited image reads in print. Glossy paper produces high contrast, vivid colour, and sharp fine detail. It works well for travel photography with strong colour, bright outdoor light, and clear skies. It also shows fingerprints and surface reflections in direct room lighting, which can be distracting when the album is placed on a coffee table under ceiling lights. Matte paper eliminates surface glare entirely and gives images a quieter, more considered look. It is the right choice for black-and-white edits, soft-light portraits, and any photo taken in the diffused golden hour light that Paris produces in the hour before sunset. The colours read slightly softer than on gloss, but the overall impression is more refined.
Luster, sometimes called pearl or satin, sits between the two. It gives richer colour than matte without the full reflectivity of gloss. For professional portrait sessions, luster is the most practical all-purpose choice. It handles a range of lighting conditions across a gallery, from bright midday shots at the Louvre to soft blue-hour images on the Seine, without any single finish fighting against the image. Most professional labs offer all three. The choice is personal, but luster is the safest default if your gallery mixes different lighting conditions.
TipIf your session included golden hour or blue-hour shots alongside brighter midday frames, choose luster paper. It handles the full range without compromise.
A gallery of 30, 50, or 60 edited images is too many to print in full without the album feeling repetitive. The goal is to select for variety and sequence, not volume. Start by grouping images by location. If your session covered two locations, the album naturally divides into two chapters. Within each chapter, choose one wide establishing image that shows the environment, one or two mid-range images that show posing and connection, and one close detail or expression shot. That structure, repeated across locations, creates a visual rhythm that holds attention across the whole album.
"I always tell clients: the photos that made you cry when the gallery arrived are the ones that go in the album," Finzi says. "The technical ones, the great-composition-but-nothing-happening ones, those are for the digital archive. The album is for the ones that hit you." Limit your selection to 20 to 30 images for a standard album, and sequence them to tell the session as a walk: where you started, the moments in the middle, and how it ended. Avoid repeating the same pose or angle twice in a row.
TipLay all your favourites out in a grid view before sequencing. Remove any two images that feel like duplicates of each other, keeping only the stronger of the pair.
An album and a wall print serve different purposes. An album is a private object. You hold it, sit with it, show it to people. It has sequence, pace, and narrative. A single large wall print is a permanent statement. It declares one image as the defining image of the session. Both are worth having, but they require different decisions. For couples and proposal sessions, one large print of the key moment alongside a layflat album of the full session is the most complete way to display the work. For family sessions, the album often does more work because the story is wider and no single image contains everything.
For a wall print, choose an image with clear negative space on at least one side. An image where both subjects are centred with architecture pressing in from all sides will be harder to frame cleanly than one where there is breathing room. The images that read best at large scale on a wall are usually the ones with strong contrast, a clear horizon line, or an architectural background that recedes into soft focus. Paris locations are designed for this. The Tower behind a couple on Avenue de Camoëns, the archway of Bir-Hakeim framing a single figure, the Luxembourg Gardens lawn stretching behind a family: all of these scale cleanly to A2 or larger.
TipPrint your wall image first. Once it is framed and hung, choose the album to complement it, not duplicate it. The two objects should tell different parts of the same story.
Order within the first two weeks of receiving your gallery. This sounds early, but it is practical for two reasons. First, the images are fresh and you will select with more emotional accuracy. Second, many professional print labs have production lead times of two to four weeks, which means ordering promptly gets the album into your hands before the memory of the session has blurred into the general noise of travel. Waiting months and then trying to select from a gallery of 50 images you have not looked at in a while leads to poorer selections and less confident editing decisions.
If you are visiting Paris and want printed photos to bring home,Paris je t'aime– the official Paris Tourist Office – notes that the city has a range of souvenir and print services available to visitors. However, for professional portrait sessions, an online professional photo lab that ships internationally will produce better results than an in-city print kiosk, which is optimised for standard consumer formats rather than full-bleed portrait layouts at large sizes.
TipSet a calendar reminder for 10 days after your session. That is the window to select, sequence, and place your order while the session is still vivid.
High-resolution files are large. A gallery of 50 edited portraits at full resolution will take significant storage space, and that storage needs to be reliable. The standard recommendation for any irreplaceable file is the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of the file, across two different storage types, with one copy stored off-site or in cloud storage. For most people, this means: the original download on a computer, a copy on an external hard drive kept at home, and a cloud backup. Services such as Google Photos, iCloud, or Amazon Photos all offer automatic cloud sync for large libraries.
Your gallery link provides lifetime access, so you are not dependent on your own storage for the original files. But relying solely on the gallery link without any personal backup is a risk. Hard drives fail. Accounts get closed. Services change. Download your files, back them up independently, and treat the gallery link as a third backup rather than a primary one. The print licence is yours forever, so whenever you want to reprint or produce a new album in future years, the files will still be available.
TipBack up your gallery files the same day you receive them. Do not wait until after you have ordered prints. The two tasks are separate and both matter.
Quick answers to the questions visitors ask before they book.
“Finzi made us feel entirely at ease. He didn't pose us; he guided us through real moments. Every photo shows us the way we actually are. Together, laughing, present.”
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