Emailing Photos Straight to Your Gallery

Why this exists

The Gallery addon already lets you drag-drop photos in the dashboard. But if you took the photo on your phone and want it on the site, dragging it through three apps is friction. Email is everywhere.

Every Gallery-enabled site gets a dedicated email address. Forward a photo to it — the photo lands in your Gallery as a draft, ready for you to review + publish.

Your site's photo email

After you enable the Gallery addon (it's enabled by default), your dashboard shows your photo email in the Gallery management view:

photos+YOUR-SITE-ID@photos.handsfreesites.com

Save it to your phone contacts as something like "📸 My Site" and you'll have one-tap forwarding from any photo.

How it works

1. You send an email with one or more photo attachments to your site's photo email.
2. Within 30 seconds, the photos appear in your Gallery dashboard with a From email + Draft badge.
3. You review each one — keep, delete, add a caption, set a sort order.
4. Publish when ready. Drafts don't appear on your live gallery page until you promote them.

What we accept

• Image types: JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP. Most modern phone formats just work.
• Per message: up to 25 photos. If you have more, send another email.
• Per photo: up to 15 MB (mid-range phone cameras are around 3-8 MB so this is plenty).
• Per message total: 50 MB combined.

Who can send

By default, only the email address on your Hands Free Sites account can send to your photo inbox. This stops randoms from filling your gallery with junk.

If you want to let a team member or a secondary inbox send photos too, that's on our roadmap — for now, send from the account email or forward.

Drafts vs. published

We always land emailed photos as drafts (never auto-publish). Reasons:

• You might have emailed a private photo by accident


• The phone may have orientation issues we don't catch


• You may want to crop or set a caption

Drafts are invisible on your live gallery until you publish them. Bulk publish from the dashboard if you trust the batch.

Limits + notes

• Photos arrive within ~30 seconds in most cases. SES (our email infra) handles billions of inbound messages a day so this is reliable.
• Non-photo attachments are silently dropped. Only image/* MIME types are saved.
• Subject + body of the email are ignored — only attachments are used. Future enhancement: parse the subject as a caption.
• We don't auto-import EXIF (date taken, location). Your phone's filename usually has the date; we use that for sort order.