An honest letter from the founder
Quick honesty: I'm not a photographer.
For context: I do shoot photos myself — weekends, street, travel — purely as a hobby. I'm not a pro, I don't run sessions for clients, and that's exactly why I could see the client-side problem so clearly.
I'm the person on the other end of the link you send to your clients. Two years ago, my wife and I sat down to choose our pregnancy session photos on one of the popular Polish gallery platforms — the one whose homepage proudly promises “intuitive galleries.”
We laughed.
The page loaded. The photos weren't there. We spent fifteen minutes clicking around before we even figured out how to see them.
We had paid for a fixed number of final photos. The gallery loaded with way more than we needed — and honestly, we loved almost all of them, which made the choice ten times harder. The only way to pick our favourites was to manually heart each one and try to remember which we liked. The filenames were meaningless camera codes — _DSC4421.jpg — so we couldn't even talk about them: “I like that one.” “Which one?” “The one with the… eyes?”
So we invented our own system. Day one: hearted everything that wasn't bad. Day two: narrowed to a second tier. Day three: picked the keepers. Three evenings to choose photos from a session that took two hours to shoot.
That's the moment Artilio started.
Today, every gallery in Artilio has a 5-star rating system, hearts that act as a 6th star, and a static gallery number on every photo that doesn't shift when you sort. So your clients can finally just say: “Honey, look at #77. I love it.” — and actually mean it.
I've spent the last two years building the platform I wish that photographer had used. I'm not pretending to know your craft. I do know exactly what's broken on the other end. Every decision in Artilio is made with both of you in mind — the person taking the photo, and the people finally choosing which ones to keep.
Before writing a single line of code, I talked to dozens of photographers to understand what actually breaks in your workflow. I'm still doing it — if you use Artilio (or looked at it and bounced), I genuinely want to hear what's missing.
