for photographers
Wedding, portrait, editorial, and commercial photographers. Lead with your work. Everything else gets out of the way.
why this works
The Cinematic, Editorial, and Atelier families treat the image as the protagonist. Verticals stay vertical. Panoramas stay panoramic. There is no forced 16:9 crop, no centered overlay text bleeding onto a subject's face, and no auto-cropped square that decapitates the bride.
A working photographer has fifty hero frames, not five. The Gallery section accepts a curated set as a masonry grid, a sequential reel, or a chaptered set (per series). When you publish a new wedding, you add it to the gallery — not rebuild the page.
The Contact section's inquiry form asks the four questions you actually need before quoting: date, location, package type, and a free-text "tell me about the day." You stop chasing prospects for basic information.
If you sell prints, the Services section accepts a Stripe Payment Link, a Big Cartel link, a SmugMug print shop, or any direct e-commerce URL as a CTA — so the page can sell, not just display.
examples
Same content. Every design family. Real generated sites — not mockups.
A wedding photographer's portfolio rendered in Atelier — fourteen totally different sites, one input.
A wedding cinematographer's site — your reel deserves more than a Vimeo link.
designs that fit
Each works for photographers — we picked these on purpose. Browse the full set after.
narrative-driven
Narrative-driven, full-bleed imagery. The default pick for wedding and documentary photographers.
View family →magazine-grade
Magazine-grade typography over image. Lands the right way for fashion, editorial, and commercial portfolios.
View family →handcrafted, editorial
Handcrafted and warm. The right family for portrait, family, and fine-art photographers who want craft visible in the chrome itself.
View family →in depth · 01
For most working photographers, the portfolio already exists — it is sitting in an Instagram grid with five years of curation baked into it. What is missing is the professional surface around it: the page a wedding planner forwards to a couple, the URL a photo editor opens from your pitch email. Instagram is where you are discovered; it is a poor place to be evaluated, because your best frame from 2023 is forty rows down and the app is engineered to swipe your viewer toward someone else's work.
This is the gap GenLP was built to close, and the input matches how photographers actually live: your name plus one link. Paste the Instagram URL, and the research pass reads your public footprint — the genre signals, the way you describe your work, the services you visibly offer — and drafts a full site around it in 10–20 minutes: hero, galleries, services with package structure, inquiry form, about page. You then do the one thing no system should do for you: choose the frames. Thirty to eighty hero images, sequenced your way.
The result is a two-layer presence that plays to each platform's strength. Instagram keeps doing discovery. The site does evaluation — full-resolution, distraction-free, with an inquiry form at the bottom instead of a follow button.
in depth · 02
Photographers over-invest in the gallery and under-invest in everything that turns a viewer into a booking. The non-negotiables: an inquiry form that captures date, location, and package interest (so your first reply can include availability and a quote instead of three clarifying questions); a services section with package shapes and starting prices (couples planning a wedding filter by budget before they filter by style); and an about page with your face on it (people hire the person who will stand next to them all day, not just the eye).
Then there is the delivery layer, which is invisible until it is wrong. Heavy, unoptimized images are the classic self-inflicted wound — a portfolio that takes eight seconds to paint has already lost the phone viewer, and most viewers are phone viewers. GenLP serves every image through a CDN with responsive srcset sizes and AVIF/WebP with JPEG fallback, so the 4K display gets the 4K render and the phone gets phone-sized bytes. Aspect ratios are respected by design: verticals stay vertical, panoramas stay panoramic, and nobody's crop decapitates a subject.
None of this replaces the pictures. It ensures the pictures are seen quickly, in the right proportions, by someone who can then book you in one step.
in depth · 03
A portfolio site's design is a claim about your photography, which is why the default-template look is so costly for photographers specifically: it makes original work feel generic by association. The 14 GenLP families were designed as distinct registers, and three of them map cleanly onto photographic genres. Cinematic runs narrative and full-bleed — the natural home for wedding and documentary work, where sequence and emotion carry the story. Editorial puts magazine-grade typography over imagery, which is how fashion and commercial portfolios expect to be read. Atelier is warm and handcrafted, right for portrait and fine-art photographers whose brand is intimacy and craft.
Because every family renders the same underlying content, the choice is reversible in a way template choices never are. Generate your site, then preview it in Cinematic and in Editorial with your actual frames — not the template shop's demo images of somebody's else's wedding — and pick the one your work looks strongest in. Rebranding from moody documentary toward bright editorial two years from now means switching families, not rebuilding a website while your inquiry form goes dark for a month.
an honest comparison
Photographers have the sharpest eye for the difference between these routes — so here it is without varnish, including where DIY is genuinely the better call.
| Criterion | Generated from your footprint | Page-builder DIY |
|---|---|---|
| Time to a live portfolio | Paste name + Instagram link, wait 10–20 minutes, curate your frames, publish. A same-week launch even in wedding season. | Template shopping alone eats a week — photographers are constitutionally incapable of settling for the third-best gallery layout — before any page is built. |
| Image handling | CDN delivery, responsive srcset, AVIF/WebP with fallback, and aspect ratios preserved — configured by default, not by you. | Builders vary wildly; getting crops, compression, and load speed right across devices is on you, and it is where most DIY portfolios quietly fail. |
| The words | Services, packages, about, and inquiry copy drafted from your public footprint. Photographers speak in images; the system covers the prose. | Every package description and bio paragraph is yours to write — the task photographers defer longest, sometimes forever. |
| Bespoke gallery experiences | Masonry, reel, and chaptered layouts are built in — but a custom scroll-linked showcase or an experimental hover interaction is out of scope. | DIY wins decisively. If your brand demands a one-of-a-kind gallery interaction, hand-built (or a developer) is the only honest route. |
| Adding new work | Publish a new wedding by adding it to the gallery in the live editor — minutes, with versions saved in case the re-sequence reads worse. | Also quick on a good builder — but layout drift accumulates, and two years of ad-hoc additions usually needs a cleanup pass nobody schedules. |
questions
Yes. Images are served through a CDN with responsive sizes (srcset) and modern formats (AVIF, WebP) with JPEG fallback. The visible bytes a viewer downloads are scaled to their device — so a portrait on a 4K display gets a 4K render, and the same portrait on a phone gets a phone-sized render. No giant unscaled JPEGs.
Not directly. Wave 4 supports uploading a curated set per gallery section. The intent is that you publish your portfolio set, not your entire catalog — most working photographers have 30–80 hero frames they actually want a prospect to see, and the page is built around that scale.
Yes. The Contact section's inquiry form has fields for date, location, package, guest count, and free-text. Submissions arrive in your inbox formatted as a brief you can quote from — no Zapier required.
Yes — the Pro plan ($25/mo) publishes to your custom domain with platform SSL handled for you. Domain mapping takes a few minutes through your DNS provider. The Starter plan publishes on a `your-name.genlp.ai` subdomain — fine while you decide on a brand name — and the free tier previews drafts without publishing.
That is the intended input. You paste your name and one link — for most photographers, the Instagram account where the work already lives — and the research pass reads your public footprint to draft the site: genre, positioning, services, about copy. It takes 10–20 minutes to generate. You then curate which frames actually go in the gallery; the system drafts the site, you direct the portfolio.
They are for the supporting surfaces, never your portfolio. Plans include AI-generated imagery (~10/month on Starter, ~50/month on Pro; watermarked previews on the free tier) that photographers typically spend on section backgrounds or an OG card — your own photography remains every gallery's content. Nothing AI-generated is ever inserted into your work.
Generating and previewing is free with no card. Publishing runs $15/mo (Starter, subdomain) or $25/mo (Pro, custom domain + SSL) — in the same band as the portfolio platforms you already know, except the copywriting, layout, and design come drafted for you instead of arriving as an empty theme.
ten seconds of your time. ten minutes of ours.
Free to try. No credit card.