Backlight Is a Powerful Subscription-Free Web App Built for Photographers

Aug 22, 2025

Jeremy Gray

Square mosaic logo and bold white text “BACKLIGHT 6” over a scenic dusk landscape with snowcapped mountains, a cloudy sky, and a small moon visible in the top right.

While there are many website builders and publishing services online, few are specifically designed for photographers and professional-quality photo sharing. That’s where The Turning Gate’s Backlight 6 comes in.

Backlight 6 enables photographers to create, manage, and customize their online photo galleries, whether for a website they built through Backlight 6 or to create photo galleries for a different platform.

“Backlight is a self-hosted web application, allowing photographers to craft stunning, versatile websites, and to create and manage photo galleries with incredible ease. Built by photographers, for photographers, Backlight’s images-first philosophy ensures your photographs are the centerpiece of your website,” The Turning Gate explains.

It is worth noting here that The Turning Gate is a team of just two very passionate developers, who originally got started together working on photo gallery plugins for Lightroom before launching Backlight in 2016. Over the past nearly 10 years, Backlight has amassed a “small but loyal following of photographers.”

A split-screen showing a photography website gallery on the left and a web design customization panel on the right, with various aspect ratio and layout settings visible.

At the core of Backlight, and what helps separate it from its competition, is that “your imagery is Backlight’s raison d’être. Everything in Backlight builds on the foundation of photography, with a focus on putting people’s images front and center. The customizable galleries, or albums, are fast, responsive, and SEO and mobile friendly.

A website gallery displays photos of Kampong Phluk, Cambodia, featuring rivers, boats, stilt houses, and scenic waterside views under cloudy skies. The title appears in bold above the photo grid.

Backlight’s built-in designer features numerous templates designed specifically for showcasing photos, and each offers robust personalization options, including colors, borders, margins, padding, aspect ratio customization, ordering, captions, and much more.

“Backlight is a unique website creation and photo publishing platform, allowing photographers to create, manage and personalize their online photo galleries,” The Turning Gate explains. “Get up and running in minutes with new photo galleries, or with an entire website. Use the built-in designer to personalize the look and functionality of your galleries or website.”

A screenshot listing website features like custom design, SEO, mobile responsiveness, Lightroom integration, no coding needed, regular updates, and developer-friendly tools, each with an icon and description in a two-column layout.

However, with available add-ons, like shopping cart, client response, galleria, and theater, photographers can use Backlight 6 to build a fully-fledged professional website for selling their work, create highly tunable slideshows, and even embed videos.

A computer screen displays a photo review interface with image details, star rating, comment options, and a text field containing "Client response X, Y, Z," above blue "Save" and gray "Cancel" buttons. — There is also an add-on for client response support

Although Backlight is decidedly a photo-first platform, The Turning Gate knows that many photographers want to include text as part of their website, whether that’s through traditional blogs — Backlight works alongside Wordpress — or photo essays. Backlight offers a wide range of options to fit any photography workflow, from amateurs looking for a way to share their images online, to those who want to deliver a multimedia experience centered around their photography, and professionals running a client-facing business.

A website homepage for Daniel Leu Photography shows a sunset sky with a tall radio tower on hills. Below, there are thumbnail images of various galleries including cityscapes and landscapes.

While Backlight is accessible, it’s not designed to be a complete all-in-one solution for hosting photography websites. Users will need their own web hosting service and an FTP client. The Turning Gate provides all the necessary installation and setup documentation, and has a robust community forum with many photographers eager to help one another create their ideal photo websites. The installation and setup documentation is robust, but in the event a photographer has a question not covered by the docs, the community will be ready to step up.

To make it even easier to build a new photography website, Backlight works alongside Lightroom Classic’s Publish Services. Using the available Turning Gate publisher Lightroom plugin, photographers can quickly import their Lightroom albums directly to their Backlight website.

A collage of rural mountain landscapes, terraced fields, village houses, and local residents, including children smiling, people walking on paths, and mist covering the lush, green hills.

Screenshot showing two browser windows side by side. The left window displays a photography website with a grid of landscape photos. The right window shows a similar photo grid in a content management interface.

A man stands on a wooden boat in front of stilt houses over water in a floating village in Cambodia under a cloudy sky. Other people are visible on the boats and near the houses.

Pricing and Availability

The latest version of Backlight, Backlight 6, has another very welcome feature: it is a one-time purchase. No subscription fees here. Photographers buy Backlight once and have it forever. While major version upgrades incur an upgrade fee, the developer is adamant that users don’t necessarily need to upgrade to each new version. While there may be new features they want, they will never lose access to their existing features when a new version launches. Further, the add-ons can be purchased a la carte as needed, so photographers do not need to buy everything all at once.

Backlight 6 is available now for $150. Add-ons for Backlight 6 range from $25 to $75.

Image credits: Backlight, The Turning Gate