this has been bugging me for a while and i feel like im constantly reinventing the wheel every time i finish a job. right now i just dump everything into a google drive folder and share a link but it feels kind of unprofessional and ive had clients get confused about which files are finals vs raws (i made the mistake of sharing both once and they tried to use an unedited log file for their website).

curious how other people handle this. do you use something specific for delivery or just a cloud folder situation. also wondering about how long you keep raw footage after a job is done, ive got drives filling up fast and some of this stuff is months old from clients who never asked for anything extra.

google drive is fine honestly, clients are used to it. i just make the folder structure really obvious ? one folder called FINALS that only has the stuff they should actually use, and if they want raws for some reason thats a separate conversation and usually an extra charge. never share your project files or ungraded footage by default, just creates confusion like you found out.

on the storage question i keep raws for 90 days after delivery and then delete if nobody asked for anything. had it come up maybe twice in 3 years where someone wanted something extra and both times it was within that window. after that its their problem to have asked sooner, i put that in my client agreement now so theres no surprises.

i switched to frame.io for client deliveries a while back and it made a huge difference for the video stuff especially, clients can leave timestamped comments which sounds annoying but actually speeds up revisions a lot because they cant just say "make it better" they have to point to the specific moment. theres a free tier that works fine if you're not doing huge volume.

for photos i still just use a shared album honestly, nothing fancy. the overthinking the delivery system thing is real though, i spent way too long trying to find the perfect solution when the main issue was just not being clear with clients about what they were getting and when. fixed that with a better onboarding email and most of the confusion went away