The days of delivering prints to clients are gone. Now, almost all images are sent as digital files. But how to deliver digital art to clients? This post shows you the three best ways to send pictures to clients – in an absolutely professional and user-friendly manner. Read on to learn about the best practices in digital art delivery!
Almost every artist dreams of living their creative passion and selling their art to make a living.
When you start your own digital art business, you will need to send pictures to clients. The days of delivering physical prints are gone. Now, the majority of images are sent as digital files. These can be digital files of your artwork, commissioned art, Photoshop resources, digital printables, digital downloads, etc.
Delivering digital art to clients is different from sending pics to family and friends. While a casual email is enough to send a picture to a friend, you need to deliver images to a client in a professional manner.
Why email is not the best way to send pictures to clients…
Emailing images to friends and family is totally okay. But when it comes to delivering digital art to clients, there are better ways to go about it.
Why is sending pictures to clients by email not the best option?
First of all, you need to keep in mind that there are limitations to the size of email attachments you can send. These limitations may vary from one provider to the other. Some email providers allow attaching very large files, while others have stricter limitations.
Considering that high-resolution digital art files and photographs are several megabytes in size, you’ll only be able to attach a few images to each email.
Second, chances are your clients will read their emails on their smartphone. Receiving large email attachments on your phone has several disadvantages:
- If your clients are using a cellular connection, your images sent will take up a decent bit of their monthly data allowance.
- If the connection is poor, downloading the attachments will take a lot of time.
- If a client doesn’t receive your email, it can take a while until you receive a delivery failure notice. In the meantime, your client won’t even know that you tried to send them an email.
All these incidents can lead to a poor customer experience that you want to avoid.
What should I export my digital art as?
Before we delve deeper into how to deliver digital art to clients, let’s see what file format you should export your artwork as.
The most common file formats are the so-called raster formats:
As a photographer, you are most likely shooting in RAW. When you create digital art in Photoshop or a similar application, you’ll be editing your files as PSD.
PSD is a format that preserves layers and keeps your work editable in all aspects. The same is true for TIFF. TIFF is layer-capable, too, and perfect for printing.
All these three formats are high-quality formats that come with pretty large file sizes. That’s why they are not so adequate for sending digital art to clients. Plus, most of the time it’s not necessary to send editable files to clients (unless you deliver Photoshop resources or similar items).
The remaining file formats are JPEG, PNG, and GIF. GIF is great for animation and transparency, but it is not so common for saving digital art.
JPEG is ideal for sending images to clients for proofing or sharing via social media. Depending on the compression factor you use, JPEG can deliver high quality that’s also adequate for printing. However, it’s a lossy format, so you need to be careful not to compress your images too much.
Related: Best File Format For Printing Digital Art
PNG is a lossless format that preserves both photo quality and details. Regardless of how often you open, edit and resave it – you will not sacrifice quality and details of your work! That’s why I chose PNG to offer high-resolution images of my artwork in my Web Store.
Learn more about the best file type to save digital art.
How do you send a digital image?
There are three ways that are commonly used to send a digital image to clients. Professional photographers and digital artists use them, and they also work great for delivering art commissions and other resources.
3 Best ways to deliver digital art to clients
1.
Instead of emailing images, the first best way to send pictures to clients is by using a cloud storage service.
In the past few years, several companies have started to offer file hosting. The most popular of these file hosting platforms are:
While these services don’t offer unlimited space for free, you will get a decent amount of several gigabytes of free storage. This is more than enough to deliver a couple of files.
All cloud storage platforms work pretty much the same way. You can upload individual files or an entire folder containing your images. After that, you can create a unique URL and send it to your client, who can then download the files directly to their computer.
2.
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is a quick and convenient way of digital delivery.
There are many free services that you can use to deliver your digital art via FTP. Here are some examples:
FTP was specifically designed for transferring large files. It’s fast and straightforward, and there’s no limit on the file size. You can even send multiple files at once.
The only problem is that transfers via FTP are not secure. So make sure to only transfer non-confidential data!
3.
The third option to deliver digital art to clients is through your own artist website. Your artist website is optimal to sell digital downloads of your art because you can automate the process completely.
Once a customer has selected a digital image of your art and paid online, they can immediately access the download. And the best thing: you don’t need to lift a finger! It all works automatically.
Apart from selling digital art, you can also sell digital printables and other downloads via your own website.
This is also a possibility to send commissioned art to clients, but you will need to create a dedicated product page with a unique URL that only your client knows. Your client can then download the commission from that page.
Making your own website isn’t difficult. There are some easy-to-use website builders for artists with great premade templates that allow you to create a website in no time. These are some excellent choices:
WordPress is another option to build your own website, but it comes with a steeper learning curve. Nevertheless, it’s absolutely doable, even without previous coding knowledge. If you are interested, I have a great tutorial for you on How To Make An Artist Website With WordPress In 5 EASY Steps!
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