Somewhere in your sent folder is an email titled “edits v3 FINAL”, carrying two attachments, followed a day later by “edits v3 FINAL(2)”. The client opened them on a phone, in whatever order the mail app decided, squinted at two separate images, and replied “looks good, but can the first one be warmer?” Which first one? And so the thread grows.
The attachment chain fails because it makes the client do the comparing, in the worst possible viewer, with no shared reference for what “the first one” means. Retouchers and photographers have quietly absorbed this friction as normal. It isn’t.
One link per edit, and the client does the dragging
Take the original and the edit, drop both into imgi.co, and send the client one link. What they open is both versions stacked in the same frame with a slider between them. They drag, the edit reveals itself against the original in place, and the difference you spent an hour on stops needing a paragraph of explanation.
Here’s the experience from the client’s side:
Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, works in the phone browser where clients actually live. The link doesn’t expire, so the approval from March is still openable when the invoice conversation happens in June. And your originals aren’t harmed in transit: imgi serves the exact bytes you upload, no recompression, so the skin texture you carefully preserved is actually what the client is looking at, not a mangled copy of it.
Two small habits raise the professionalism another notch. Label the sides, “Original” and “Edited” beats before/after for client work, or use dates for long projects. And crop both files identically before uploading, since a slider over mismatched frames shows the mismatch first; the lining-up guide covers this for shots taken months apart.
Rounds of revisions without the (2)(3)(final) circus
Version rounds are where this workflow pays for itself. One comparison holds up to ten images with a dropdown that swaps which pair is under the slider. So a portrait retouch becomes: Original, v1, v2, v3, all in one comparison, all labeled. The client compares v2 against v3 directly, not against their memory of an attachment from Tuesday. “Warmer” gets resolved by dragging v2 against v3 instead of by adjective negotiation.
For a whole shoot, group the comparisons into an album: twenty selects, each with its own before/after slider, one link for the entire delivery review. The client pages through, you get feedback tied to specific frames, and nobody ever types “which photo do you mean” again.
Discretion, because client work is client work
Some edits shouldn’t be on a public URL, and unlisted links are sometimes not enough for the cautious. Two options cover the range. Pro accounts can mark uploads private, so the comparison opens only for you, sensible for commercial shoots under embargo or any portrait client who asks. And for the truly sensitive, offline mode runs the same slider entirely in your browser with nothing uploaded at all, which turns an in-person review meeting into: open laptop, drag slider, done.
The same discretion applies in reverse when you want to show off. Ask the client before their face or their house becomes your portfolio piece. Then the one-line embed puts the interactive slider on your site, which converts better than a static gallery for the same reason it works on clients: visitors drag, and dragging is believing.
The quiet sales tool
A before and after the client can play with does something an attachment never does: it makes your work legible. Most clients cannot articulate what changed in a good retouch, they just feel it. The slider shows them the recovered highlights, the cleaned background, the color that came alive, at their own pace, as many times as they like. It’s the difference between telling someone you did the work and letting them catch you doing it.
That has knock-on effects. Approvals come faster because the comparison answers questions before they’re asked. Scope disputes shrink, because “here’s the original” is one drag away for the client who forgot how rough the source was. And referrals improve, because the link that convinced your client is forwardable, watermark-free on the viewer page, and carries the interaction with it.
For social proof where embeds don’t run, Instagram, a story, a reel background, export the same comparison as a GIF or MP4 and the transition plays on its own. Same two files, every format the pitch needs.
Upload one real edit pair and send the link instead of the attachments, once. The reply you get back will retire the email chain on its own.