You can make a Placeholder Gallery to "hold the spot" of a gallery before you upload photos and publish the actual gallery, allowing you to collect email addresses of visitors who wish to be notified of the gallery's availability.

Perhaps you're a wedding photographer. At the wedding reception, you could have cards on display with your same-day slideshow that says:

"To view Mary and Joe's photos, visit bryan.client.photos/galleries/mary-joe"

You could also have the bride and groom share this link on their wedding website and on social media.

This link would be a placeholder gallery that you previously published since you obviously won't have the photos ready for a few weeks. Once the guest visits the placeholder gallery, they'll be asked to enter their email address so they can be notified once the gallery is available.

Then, in a couple of weeks, once the gallery is made available, you publish it and take it out of placeholder mode, email the guests who signed up to view it, and they can all go and view the photos.

There are two ways to make a placeholder gallery:

When you publish a gallery in placeholder mode, it will not be available for viewing photos, but instead, will be an email collection form.

Note: You can still upload photos, create collections and set a featured image, but only the cover photo will be viewable until the gallery is no longer a placeholder gallery.

When a gallery is in placeholder mode, you can view who has signed up to be notified of the gallery's availability. Go to the Activity Feed, and you'll see the "Placeholder E-mail" listed, which indicates that the gallery has X number of guests signed up to view the gallery. Click the "Placeholder E-mail" button to view more details.

While in the "Placeholder Email" inside the Activity Feed, you can manually add guests/emails to the guest list for the placeholder gallery by selecting the "New Guest" option at the bottom of the list.

To take a gallery out of placeholder mode, and therefore make the photos available for viewing, simply disable the "Placeholder" toggle in the "Settings" panel under "Availability". Once you exit the settings your changes will be saved automatically.

Once the gallery is out of placeholder mode, you can send an email to all guests who signed up to be notified of the gallery's availability. Click the "Placeholder emails" under the activity feed scroll down to the bottom of the list and click the "Email All" button.

This will open up the "Compose Email" modal with all the "To" emails automatically populated, where you can type your email to the guests to let them know that the gallery is available for viewing.

Note: You can also export the list of emails to a CSV for import into any other online marketing platforms.