How to upload photos: all the ways, explained

In short

There are five ways to get photos into an album, and they all end in the same place - your photos are processed automatically and show up in the album a few minutes after the upload finishes:

You'll find all of them on the upload page of any album: open your album and press Upload.

Which method should I use?

A few hundred photos or less? Use the web uploader. It's right there, it retries failed parts automatically, and if you drop a single ZIP with everything inside, we unzip it for you.

A full event - thousands of photos or many gigabytes? This is where we really recommend SFTP. It sounds technical, but it's easier than you think: you install a free app once (like Cyberduck), paste in the credentials we give you, and drag your folder over. From then on, every big upload is bulletproof: the queue resumes on its own if your connection blips, and nothing depends on a browser tab staying open. If you shoot large events regularly, learning it once will save you hours - we wrote a step-by-step guide that walks you through every click.

Want big-upload reliability with zero setup? The desktop app is the middle ground: a native app for Mac and Windows that uploads thousands of photos with automatic retry and resume, while you keep working. Its watched folders upload every photo you export from Lightroom or Capture One by themselves.

Shot a few photos with your phone, or edited on it? Upload them from the ZebraSnap mobile app for iPhone and Android.

Already organizing everything in Lightroom Classic? Skip the export step entirely with the Lightroom plugin - publish your edited photos directly to your ZebraSnap album.

What files can I upload?

Photos - JPG, JPEG, and PNG, up to 16 MB per image.

Compressed files - ZIP, 7Z, RAR, TAR.GZ, TGZ, and TAR. Drop one archive with all your photos inside and we unpack it and add every photo to the album. This is the easiest way to upload a lot of photos through the web.

Videos - MP4 (H.264 video, AAC audio), up to 2 GB per video. Buyers see a short, watermarked low-quality preview and only get the full video after they buy. More details in How videos work.

Not supported (yet): RAW files (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG...) and HEIC. Export your finals as JPEG first - it's what buyers receive anyway. The mobile app is the exception for HEIC: it converts iPhone photos to JPEG as it uploads.

Things that are true for every method

• Processing is automatic. After an upload finishes, we generate previews, watermarks, and run face and bib-number recognition. Photos usually appear in the album within a few minutes; huge batches can take a little longer. You don't have to do anything.

• Same filename = same photo. Every photo in an album is identified by its file name. Uploading a file with a name that's already there replaces the old photo, which makes re-uploading a corrected photo trivial - just keep the filename. A few methods protect you from doing it by accident:

  • SFTP skips names that already exist, so re-running an upload only sends what's missing.
  • The desktop app asks before replacing: Replace or Skip them.
  • The Lightroom plugin refuses a different photo with a repeated name (re-publishing the same photo still replaces it).

  If you shoot with two cameras, make sure their file names don't overlap. And if you deleted photos from an album, don't re-upload the same full folder: the deleted ones come back.

• Keep original filenames. It makes finding and replacing a specific shot much easier later.

• You can mix methods. Start an album over SFTP and top it up from your phone with the mobile app - everything lands in the same album.

• Storage counts. Uploads stop when your plan's storage is full. See Plans, prices and limits.

Tips for big albums

1. Use SFTP - seriously. It's the most reliable path for thousands of files, and the guide makes it painless.
2. If you'd rather stay in the browser, upload one ZIP instead of thousands of individual files. Fewer moving parts, fewer chances for your connection to hiccup.
3. Don't rename files between sessions. If an upload is interrupted and you re-upload with the same names, replaced files don't create duplicates.
4. You can close the page once the upload (not the processing) is done. Processing happens on our servers - feel free to leave.

Each method, in depth

• Uploading from the web (Photos & files)
• Uploading with SFTP - step by step with Cyberduck
• Uploading with the desktop app
• Publishing from Lightroom Classic
• The ZebraSnap apps: mobile, desktop and Lightroom