A Gallery Per Look, Per Project, or Per Photographer
Following on from photo categories, you can now build as many separate galleries as you want on your actor portfolio website, each with its own page or grouped onto one.
Three ways actors organize photos, and when each works
By look. The most useful arrangement for casting. Corporate, edgy, warm, period. It answers the question a casting director is actually asking, which is whether you can be the person in the script.
By project. Best if you have real production stills from named work. It doubles as evidence, and it pairs well with your credits.
By photographer. Rarely right for a public site. It organizes your work around somebody else's business rather than yours. It is genuinely useful as a private archive.
The restraint argument
Now that there is no limit, here is the case against using it. Every gallery you add divides the attention of a visitor who was already only going to give you thirty seconds. Four galleries of six photographs is a portfolio. Twelve galleries of two is a filing system.
If you cannot fill a gallery with at least four images you are proud of, fold it into another one.
Practical setup
- Put your strongest gallery first. Menu order is under your control, as covered in drag to reorder your menu.
- Name galleries in plain words. "Headshots" beats "Selects 2025".
- Keep image counts even. A gallery of twelve next to one of two looks like a mistake.
- Hide rather than delete when a project ends. See a safer way to delete a page.
Performance is handled
Large galleries used to be the slowest thing on an actor site. They are not any more: images load as you scroll, they are resized for the screen requesting them, and they come from a nearby server. The detail is in faster headshot galleries and moving image hosting to a CDN.
What galleries are for
Not to display everything you own. To make one argument: this is what I look like, and here is the range of things I can plausibly be. Our older piece on crafting a stand-out acting portfolio is the fuller version, and it has aged well.
Ready to build one? Create your free actor website and start with a single gallery of your six best photographs.
