Do Client Picks Land on Your RAW Files in Lightroom Classic?

Publish through the plugin, and picks are searched under the same name you published from.

The JPEG the client saw is a rendering made for the gallery. Its name inside the gallery is not the name of that temporary JPEG. It is the file name of the catalog photo, which is your RAW file when you shoot RAW.

When you run Import ClientGallery Picks, the plugin asks the gallery for its picks, labels and, if you ask for them, comments. Each pick arrives with the file name the gallery holds. The plugin then searches the catalog you have open for each of those names.

Every catalog photo the search returns gets the client's rating, and joins a picks collection named after the gallery. You never retype a file name, and you never cross-reference a list by hand.

The plugin is one way to fill a gallery. You can also upload photos in the browser. The two routes store different names, and that changes what the pick import looks for.

The first row is the reason the plugin exists. The proof and the RAW share one name from the start, so there is nothing to translate afterwards.

The second row can still work, but it depends on your export. If your export renamed the files, for example to Smith_Wedding_001, those names do not appear anywhere in your catalog. The search then finds nothing, and the plugin tells you that none of the picked file names were found in this catalog.

If you proof from browser uploads, export without a renaming template, or better, publish through the plugin instead. The RAW vs JPEG proofing guide covers why the client should see JPEGs either way.

The pick import uses Lightroom's file name search with the rule set to contain the name. It does not ask for a whole-name match. It also does not stop at the first hit, and it does not check that there is only one.

In practice, a searched name matches every catalog photo whose file name contains it. A long, unique name will almost always find one photo. A short or common name can find several.

The examples leave out file extensions on purpose. The point is the pattern: the more generic the name, the more photos it can reach.

Camera default names are where this bites. Counters roll over, and a catalog that spans years can hold the same camera name many times.

There is a second rule on the gallery side. A gallery holds one photo per file name.

When the plugin uploads a photo whose name already exists in that gallery, the new upload replaces the old one in place. The row stays, the client's picks on it stay, and only the pixels change.

That is useful when you re-edit a frame and publish again: the client keeps their pick and sees the new version.

It is a problem when two different photos share a name. The usual case is a second shooter whose camera uses the same naming pattern as yours. If both of you have a DSC_0412 in the same job, publishing both into one gallery leaves only the one uploaded last.

Then the pick import searches for DSC_0412 and finds both catalog photos, so both get the client's rating, even though the client only ever saw one of them.

Both weak spots have the same fix: give every photo a unique, specific name before the proofing round starts.

Rename the catalog photos themselves, not only the export. Because the plugin uploads under the catalog photo's own name, a rename in the catalog carries straight through to the gallery and back again.

A job prefix does most of the work. Something like the client's name and the shoot date, followed by a sequence number, is unlikely to be contained in any other file name in your catalog.

For two shooters, add a shooter code to the name as well, so the two cameras can never produce the same name in one job.

Do the rename before you publish, and leave the names alone until the picks are back. If you rename a photo after the client picked it, the gallery still holds the old name, and the search looks for a name the catalog no longer has.

Once a photo is found, the import writes the same fields on it every time.

These values replace what the fields held before. A photo you had at 5 stars that the client only liked will end up at 3 stars. The caption option also replaces any caption already on the photo, which is why it is off unless you turn it on.

The import never clears anything and never sets Rejected. It does not touch develop settings or keywords.

This matters for matching, too. If a contains match reaches an unrelated old photo, that old photo's rating and label are overwritten. Unique names protect your archive as much as they protect the current job.

The full walk-through of the pull, including the picks collection, is in getting client picks back into Lightroom.

The import ends with a summary that counts the photos it added to the collection. That count is the number of catalog matches, not the number of picks.

Compare it with how many photos the client picked or labelled. If the summary shows more, some names matched more than one catalog photo.

Open the picks collection, which sits inside a ClientGallery collection set and carries the gallery's name. Sort by capture time. A photo from another date stands out at once.

If the summary shows fewer, or the plugin reports that nothing was found, check two things. First, that the catalog holding this shoot is the one open, because the import only searches the open catalog. Second, that the gallery was built from files whose names exist in that catalog.

This workflow suits a photographer who keeps each job in a Lightroom Classic catalog and publishes proofs from that catalog. The names line up by construction, and a rename before publishing removes the edge cases.

It suits you less if you proof from JPEGs exported by another tool under new names. The import cannot connect those names to your RAW files. In that case the gallery's Export picks (.txt) button gives you a plain list of file names to work from instead.

It does not work at all in the cloud Lightroom app. The plugin is for Lightroom Classic only.

• clientgallery.io product facts, checked in code 18 September 2026: the ClientGallery Lightroom Classic plugin (pick import and export service) and the gallery upload rules. Covers the file name the plugin uploads under, one photo per file name per gallery, the contains-style file name search in the open catalog, the 3 and 5 star values, the Pick flag on loves, labels and the opt-in caption.
• clientgallery.io, Lightroom plugin page, https://clientgallery.io/lightroom, checked 18 September 2026.
• Adobe's Lightroom Classic help pages returned an error when fetched on 18 September 2026, so no Adobe behaviour or wording is described or quoted on this page.