How to send a whole folder, structure intact

Two options: zip it, which is lossless and universally understood but adds a step for the recipient, or use a service that keeps folder structure natively. Which you want depends on whether the structure is part of the deliverable — for a shoot or a project handover it is, and a flattened list of 400 filenames is a problem you have handed to your client.

What actually goes wrong

Sending a folder fails in three distinct ways, and they are worth naming because services differ on all three.

Flattening. Some services take every file out of its folder and present one long list. Your Ceremony/Selects and Reception/Raw become 400 filenames in upload order. This is the most common failure and the most annoying to fix.

Silent truncation. This one is nastier. Browsers hand a dropped folder to a web page in pages of 100 entries at a time, and an implementation that asks once and stops gets the first 100 files and reports success. You upload a 400-file shoot, the page says it is done, and 300 files are missing. Nothing errors.

If you are dropping large folders into a web uploader, count the files afterwards. It takes ten seconds and it catches the one failure mode that looks exactly like success.

Hidden files. A folder that has been open on a Mac has a .DS_Store in every subdirectory. Windows leaves Thumbs.db. They are harmless but they clutter a delivery and, on services that count files, they count.

Zipping: when and how

Zip when the recipient's convenience matters less than certainty. It is lossless, preserves structure exactly, and every operating system opens it without extra software.

Worth knowing:

It will not shrink much. Photos, video, audio and PDFs are already compressed. A zip of a RAW shoot saves a few percent. Zipping is about packaging, not size — if you are zipping to get under a limit, it will not work.

Zip, do not split. Multi-part archives require the recipient to have all parts and the right tool. Losing one makes the rest useless. Only do it if a link genuinely cannot be used.

Name the archive properly. Smith-Wedding-Selects.zip, not Archive.zip. It will sit in someone's downloads folder for a year.

Watch for duplicate names. Two files called IMG_001.jpg from different folders can collide when an archive is built badly, and extractors keep whichever landed last. A well-behaved service renames the second; a badly-behaved one loses it silently.

Services that keep structure

The alternative is a service that stores the folder tree and rebuilds it on download, so the client gets the same shape you uploaded without either of you touching a zip tool.

This is worth checking specifically, because it is rarely on comparison tables. Two questions:

1. Does it preserve folders on upload?
2. Does it download as a single archive at any size?

The second matters more than it sounds. SwissTransfer, for instance, takes 50 GB free — but per Infomaniak's own documentation checked 1 August 2026, archives over 10 GB must be downloaded one file at a time. For a folder delivery that is the difference between one click and four hundred.

Yungle collections, which I build, keep structure exactly as uploaded and download as one archive at any size — that combination is the reason they exist. Free transfers are 10 GB each and unlimited in number. The comparison covers the alternatives properly, including where they beat it.

Before you send a folder

1. Clean it. Remove the hidden files, the duplicate exports, the Untitled 3.psd.
2. Name folders so they explain themselves without you in the email.
3. Check the total size, not the largest file — it decides which method is even available.
4. Count the files. Write the number down.
5. After uploading, count again. This is the truncation check and it is the whole reason this list exists.
6. Download it yourself once, from a signed-out browser, and confirm the structure arrived. This also catches the delivery being private when you thought it was shared.

Step six takes two minutes and prevents the two most embarrassing emails in this line of work: "there are only 100 photos here" and "it says I don't have access".

The related cases

A shoot with RAW and edited versions: structure is doing real work there, and the RAW delivery page covers how to organise it.

A finished video job with masters, stems and stills: same problem, and the same solution.

Anything containing other people's personal data: the folder question is the easy part; who can reach the link and for how long is the one worth spending time on.