Publishing a portfolio
Studio saves your work as a draft. Publishing turns that draft into the public portfolio that visitors can open.
Updated August 24, 2026
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Draft, preview, and live are different
Changes in Studio are saved to your working draft. Saving a portfolio, gallery, photo, or appearance setting does not immediately alter the public site.
Preview generates the current draft at a temporary preview address. Publish creates a new live version. If a portfolio is already live, visitors keep seeing the last successful version until a later publish finishes.
The portfolio exists only in Studio. No public portfolio is live.
A live version exists, but one or more saved Studio changes are not live yet.
The current successful publish matches the saved public draft.
Publishing requirements
- Verify the account email and accept the current Terms when Studio requests it.
- Reserve a public username. This becomes username.iso100.photos.
- Choose a portfolio cover, or have a processed public photo that ISO100 can use as the cover.
- Create at least one Public gallery containing at least one Public photo whose status is Ready.
- Stay within the current plan's gallery, photo, published-photo, and storage limits.
- Resolve rejected or restricted public photos before publishing.
A gallery must be Public to appear on the portfolio, and each photo intended for that gallery must also be Public and Ready. Changing only one of those settings is not enough.
Preview before publishing
- 01Open PortfolioIn Studio, open Portfolio. The Publishing panel shows whether the portfolio is live and whether saved changes are waiting.
- 02Review the change listWhen Review changes is available, open it to inspect added, updated, and removed portfolio, gallery, and photo items before publishing.
- 03Generate a previewSelect Preview portfolio or Preview changes. ISO100 builds the draft and opens a temporary preview without changing the live site.
- 04Check the real viewing experienceOpen the portfolio root, each changed gallery, and several photo views. Check phone and desktop widths, cover crops, text contrast, gallery order, captions, links, and password gates.
Publish the current draft
- 01Return to the Publishing panelAfter the preview is correct, select Publish or Publish changes.
- 02Wait for completionPublishing creates static public pages and can take a moment. Do not assume a tab close or timeout means the previous live site was damaged; a failed publish leaves the last successful version live.
- 03Open the public addressUse View portfolio after publishing. The main address is username.iso100.photos unless an active custom domain is connected.
Publishing frequency
ISO100 allows 20 publishes on Free and 100 on Plus in any rolling 24-hour period. These are fair-use safeguards for unusually frequent updates, not targets you need to manage during normal portfolio work.
Each accepted publish counts once. If it ultimately fails, it is removed from the total. Selecting Publish again while the same draft is already being published continues the existing attempt, and a draft that already matches the live portfolio is not published again.
What becomes public
Published portfolio pages can show Public photographs, Public galleries, Unlisted pages at their direct URLs, contact options where enabled, footer links, license or rights notices, and search and social metadata.
Original uploads stay private by default. Public pages use processed display variants.
- Draft galleries and Draft photos are excluded.
- Unlisted galleries are omitted from portfolio navigation and search indexing, but anyone with the direct link can open them unless a password is also required.
- Password-protected galleries publish a password gate and are excluded from the portfolio gallery index.
- Each Public and Ready photo has its own page and can appear in search results, whether it belongs to no gallery, one gallery, or several.
- An Unlisted and Ready photo keeps a direct page but is omitted from galleries and search indexing.
- A photo used only inside password-protected galleries has no standalone page, so its gallery password cannot be bypassed.
Publish later changes
- 01Save the editUse Save portfolio, Save gallery, Save photo, or Save in Appearance. The public version does not change yet.
- 02Check Unpublished changesOpen Portfolio and review which items differ from the live version.
- 03Preview and publish againGenerate a fresh preview, then select Publish changes. Gallery order, photo order, metadata, visibility, URLs, covers, and appearance changes all require a new publish.
Take the portfolio offline
- 01Open Danger zoneIn Portfolio > Publishing, expand Danger zone.
- 02Select Unpublish portfolioConfirm the action. The public portfolio and its gallery pages go offline, while the editable draft remains in Studio.
- 03Publish again when readyReturn to Portfolio and publish the draft at any time. Unpublishing is not the same as deleting the portfolio or account.
Restore a previous live version
- 01Open Publish historyIn the Publishing panel, expand Publish history and select Open publish history.
- 02Choose a successful versionCompare the published date and gallery and photo counts, then select Restore this version.
- 03Confirm the restorationThe selected version replaces the live portfolio. Your current Studio draft does not change, so you can return to it and publish it again later.
A restoration is not an editor undo. If you want the draft itself to match an older version, recreate those settings in Studio.
Open Studio to make the change.
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