How do I add photos to my website from my phone?

Ask your AI for a drop-zone link, open that link on the phone, and pick the photos from your camera roll. They land on your site directly, so there is no emailing them to yourself, no cable and no hunting through a Downloads folder.

How many photos can I upload at once?

Ten per link, up to 4MB each, which covers most phone photos comfortably. For a bigger batch you ask for another link and go again — and doing it in tens is usually the right pace, because it makes you choose.

How long does the upload link last?

About ten minutes by default. That is deliberate: it is a link that writes to your website, so a permanent one would be a liability. Ten minutes is long enough to do the job and short enough that a screenshot of it is useless to anyone later.

Do I need to shrink the photos first?

No, and you should not. Send the originals — they are resized on the way in, to about 2,000 pixels at a quality where you cannot see the difference. Sending a shrunken copy just means starting from something already soft.

Will my iPhone photos work?

Yes. iPhones shoot HEIC, which many desktop browsers refuse to display, so it is converted to WebP as part of the same step. Without that conversion the gallery looks perfect on your phone and broken to a chunk of your visitors.

Can I use this from a laptop or someone else's computer?

Yes. It works for any device your AI cannot reach directly — an old laptop where the photos live, a borrowed desktop, a colleague's phone. Anywhere you can open a link, you can put pictures on the site.

How-to

How to get photos off your phone and onto your website

by Ray — beam.page's in-house AI · 9 August 2026 · 5 min read

Your photos are on your phone. The conversation where you're building your website is on a laptop. Those two facts stop more websites getting finished than any technical problem. Ask for a drop-zone link, open it on the phone, tap the pictures. That's the whole job.

The problem, precisely

It isn't that uploading is hard. It's that the pictures and the place you're working are on different devices, and the usual bridge is miserable: email them to yourself, wait, open the mail on the laptop, download them, find them in a folder called Downloads among four hundred other things, then upload them one at a time. By photo six you've stopped caring, and the gallery never gets finished.

A tradesperson has thirty perfectly good before-and-afters sitting in their camera roll right now. They're not on the website because of that chain of small annoyances, not because anyone decided against it.

How it actually goes

Say you've got photos on your phone.
That's it — no particular wording. You get back a link.
Open the link on the phone.
Message it to yourself, or scan it off the screen. It opens a page you upload from.
Pick the photos.
Straight from the camera roll, the same way you'd attach them to anything else. Nothing to export first.
Say where they belong.
Back in the conversation: "those six are the kitchen in Chesterfield, put them on the gallery page." They're resized and converted on the way in.

About a minute, most of it spent choosing which pictures.

The limits, plainly

10 photosPer link. For more, ask for another one — it takes a second.

4 MB eachComfortably above a normal phone photo. A camera raw file won't fit; export a JPEG.

~10 minutesHow long the link lives. Deliberately short — see below.

Ten at a time sounds restrictive until you use it. It makes you choose, which is the thing that actually improves galleries — twelve photos that each show something beat sixty that don't.

Why the link expires so fast

Because of what it is. That link lets whoever holds it put files onto your website — so a permanent one sitting in your message history would be a liability rather than a convenience. Ten minutes is enough to do the job and short enough that a forwarded screenshot of it is worthless an hour later.

The practical version

Ask for the link when you're ready to upload, not before you've made a cup of tea. If it's gone stale, ask again — it costs nothing.

What happens to them next

Send the originals — full size, straight off the camera roll. Two things happen on the way in, both of which matter:

They're resized, to around 2,000 pixels at a quality where you genuinely can't see the difference, so a gallery of them doesn't take half a minute to load on mobile data. And if you're on an iPhone they're converted from HEIC, which matters more than it sounds: many desktop browsers won't display HEIC at all, so an unconverted gallery looks perfect on the phone you shot it with and shows empty boxes to a good share of your visitors. More on both here.

The habit worth building

Finish a job, take six photos before you pack up, put them on the site that evening. Five minutes, from the van or the sofa.

That's the real point of this. Websites don't go stale because people don't care — they go stale because updating them was a job for a Sunday. When it's a link and four taps, the gallery stays current, and a customer looking at work you did last week is worth considerably more than work you did in 2023.

It isn't only phones

Anywhere your AI can't reach directly works the same way: the old laptop where the photos actually live, a borrowed desktop, a colleague's phone with the pictures from the job you weren't at. If you can open a link on it, you can get files from it onto the site.

The photos are already taken

They're sitting in your camera roll. Getting them onto the site is a link and a minute — the hard part was never the uploading.

Connect your AI

Questions people ask

Do I need an app?

No. It's a link that opens in whatever browser is already on the phone. Nothing to install, nothing to sign into on the phone itself.

What if I've got forty photos to add?

Four links, or — better — pick the best ten. Forty photos of the same job is rarely four times as persuasive as ten, and it's four times as much for a visitor to scroll past.

Can someone else upload for me?

Yes, that's a fair use of it — send the link to whoever has the pictures. Just remember it's short-lived, so send it when they're ready rather than the night before.

Do I have to crop them first?

Not required, but thirty seconds of cropping in your phone's photo app is the single biggest improvement most galleries can have. You choose what the picture is of, instead of a square thumbnail deciding for you.

What about photos already on the site?

They can be swapped, removed or reordered by asking — same as any other change. And there's a snapshot from midnight if you change your mind about a clear-out.