How to Get Client Photo Picks Back Into Lightroom

The manual loop has four steps and each one leaks. The client marks favorites in the gallery. You get a list of filenames, by email, by screenshot or by export. You reproduce that list inside Lightroom, usually by pasting into a text filter. Then you mark what you found with your own stars or flags so the selection survives the next time you close the catalog.

Nothing in that loop is hard. It is just manual, and it is lossy at both ends. A text search can pull in photos the client never chose. It can also miss photos it should have caught. And when it is done, the client's own structure, the difference between a mild yes and a definite yes, or a color the client used to mean "print this one big", is gone. You have a selection, not the client's selection.

The clientgallery.io plugin for Lightroom Classic installs through the Plug-in Manager like any other plugin. It adds two things: a ClientGallery destination in the Export dialog, and a ClientGallery Publish Service in the left panel. The pick import rides along with both.

Setup is one field. Copy your studio key from the ClientGallery export or publish settings and paste it into the import dialog the first time you run it. The plugin remembers it, so every later import opens with the key already filled in. The key is also what authorizes the request, which is why the import can only ever read galleries that belong to your own studio.

Nothing else needs configuring. There is no per-gallery token to generate, no export step on the gallery side, and no file to download and re-import.

Once the client has finished choosing, the whole return trip is five clicks.

1. Open the catalog that holds the shoot. The match is against the catalog that is open right now, so open the one the photos were imported into.
2. Library menu, Plug-in Extras, Import ClientGallery Picks. The dialog opens with your studio key already in place.
3. Paste the gallery link. The same link you already sent the client. Not a new export, not an admin URL, the delivery link itself.
4. Decide about comments. One checkbox writes the client's comments into the IPTC caption. It is off by default, and the next section explains why you should usually leave it off.
5. Click Import. The plugin matches by filename, writes the metadata, builds the collection, and reports what it did: how many photos it added, how many color labels it applied, how many captions it wrote.

It is re-runnable at any time. If the client adds five more picks on Thursday, run it again on Thursday and the same collection is topped up. You do not start a second collection and you do not reconcile two lists.

The mapping is deliberate. Two pick levels in the gallery become the two things Lightroom photographers already filter on, and the five gallery label colors are the same five Lightroom uses, so a client's green is a green label in your catalog.

Note what is not on that list. No photos are moved, no develop settings are altered, nothing is exported, and nothing is deleted. The import writes metadata and builds a collection. That is the entire footprint.

Because the picks arrive as native Lightroom attributes rather than as a list, the tools you already use work on them.

• Filter to the definite yeses. In the Library filter bar, Attribute row, set the rating to five stars, or switch on the flag filter. Those are the loves.
• Keep the maybes visible. Three stars is a like: worth editing if the package has room, not a commitment. Filtering at three stars and above gives you the whole shortlist, filtering at five gives you the must-do list.
• Read the colors as instructions. If you agreed with the client that green means yes and red means fix something, that agreement is now a filter rather than a note in your inbox.
• Build the edit queue as a smart collection. A smart collection set to pick flag flagged, or rating five stars, gives you a live queue that refills itself the next time you re-run the import.

The practical effect is that you develop the frames the client chose, in the order the client weighted them, and you never open the gallery in a browser to check. The wider round trip, publishing the proofs and re-publishing after edits, is covered in the two-way Lightroom workflow guide.

Client comments can be written into each photo's IPTC caption, one line per comment, prefixed with who wrote it. It is genuinely useful when the comments are requests rather than compliments, because the request then travels with the file through your edit.

It is off by default for one reason: it overwrites whatever caption the photo already carries. If you caption for stock, for an agency, for archival metadata or for accessibility, leave it off. If your captions are empty, turn it on and the client's notes are in the Metadata panel where you edit, instead of in a mail thread you have to keep re-finding.

This is worth stating precisely, because it is the actual difference between the two products and it is easy to overclaim.

Pixieset's Lightroom plugin is upload-only, and Pixieset says so in the first line of its own install article: "The Pixieset Lightroom Plug-in allows you to upload photos to Pixieset directly from Lightroom Classic." It installs as a Publish Service and mirrors the Collection and Set structure. One sync direction does exist, and Pixieset is emphatic about its limit: the structure sync pulls collection and set names, and "Your photos from Pixieset will not be imported into Lightroom."

For favorites, the documented return path is the Lightroom Copy List. Pixieset describes it as a feature that "will create a list of all images in a Favorite List, formatted perfectly for Lightroom's search function". You copy the list, go to Library, Find, set Any Searchable Field and Contains, and paste. If you want the files themselves rather than the names, the documented route is a ZIP or an email from the Favorite Activity screen, followed by a manual re-import.

So: no collection is created in your catalog, no flags or stars are set, and no metadata is written. Pixieset's documentation does not describe importing client picks back into a Lightroom catalog at all.

The two failure modes below are not our criticism. They are printed in Pixieset's own help article for the feature, which is to their credit and is also the clearest statement of what a text search cannot do.

It over-selects. Verbatim: "If you are searching for IMG_1, for example, IMG_101 might come up as well." The Contains operator matches partial sequences, so a client's 42 picks can surface as 60 photos and you have to weed the extras out by eye.

It silently misses virtual copies. Verbatim: "the Lightroom Copy List will not pull the virtual copies up", followed by Pixieset's own advice that if you use virtual copies you will want to double-check that all images are selected. Silent misses are the worse of the two, because an over-selection is visible and an omission is not.

Both are inherent to matching text in a search field, and neither is a bug. They are the reason a filename match that runs inside the catalog and reports its own result is a different kind of tool.

The copy-list method works. It is free, it needs no plugin at all, and for a photographer with tidy sequential filenames who does not use virtual copies it is a serviceable two-minute job. Paste, select all, star them, move on. If that is your situation and you run four shoots a year, the two minutes are not the problem in your business and you should not switch platforms over them.

The argument here is narrower than "the old way is useless". It is that the old way is manual and lossy at the edges. It costs two minutes per gallery when it works and an unknown amount of rework when it quietly does not, and it discards the client's weighting and colors, which were the most useful part of what the client did.

You do not use Lightroom Classic. This is a Lightroom Classic plugin. A studio that culls and edits in Capture One gets nothing from it. Pixieset documents a filename-list path for Capture One, using Select by Filename List with a space delimiter, and that is the right tool for that workflow. So is a studio working entirely in the cloud version of Lightroom, which has no plugin surface of this kind for either product.

Your business runs on the print store. Pixieset sells prints through an integrated store, commission-free on every paid Client Gallery tier. If a meaningful share of your revenue comes through that store, and your ordering, pricing and fulfillment are all set up inside it, a one-command pick import is not worth dismantling that for. clientgallery.io has no print store, no commissions and no storage tiers, which is what keeps it at one flat price, and it is also what makes it the wrong choice for a print-led studio.

You deliver RAW or video. clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video. That is a deliberate limit and it is part of why the price is flat, but if RAW delivery is your service, this is not your platform.

There is one failure the import reports plainly, and it is worth understanding because it is almost always the same cause. If none of the picked filenames exist in the open catalog, the plugin says so, tells you how many filenames it was looking for, and tells you to import the shoot folder first and run it again. It does not create an empty collection and it does not fail silently.

Three things cause it, in order of frequency.

• The shoot is not in this catalog. The files are on the drive but were never imported, or you have the wrong catalog open. Import the folder and re-run.
• The files were renamed on export. The match is on filename, so if the gallery carries export names and the catalog carries capture names, nothing lines up. Publishing straight from the catalog avoids this, which is the practical argument for publishing the gallery from Lightroom Classic rather than uploading a folder of exports.
• The client picked in a different gallery. Check that the link you pasted is the gallery the client actually used, not an earlier round.

A partial result is not an error. If the import reports fewer photos than the client picked, the missing ones are the frames whose filenames are not in this catalog, and the same three causes apply to them.

Plugin behavior was verified in the clientgallery.io Lightroom Classic plugin source, version 3.2.0, on 4 September 2026. All Pixieset pages were fetched on 4 September 2026.

• clientgallery.io Lightroom Classic plugin, version 3.2.0 (Library menu item, studio key, 3-star likes, 5-star loves flagged as Picks, color label mapping, collection inside a ClientGallery collection set, optional IPTC captions, the not-found message), verified in the plugin source 4 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/lightroom
• Pixieset, How do I install the Lightroom Plugin ("allows you to upload photos to Pixieset directly from Lightroom Classic", structure sync, "Your photos from Pixieset will not be imported into Lightroom"), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003009832-How-do-I-install-the-Lightroom-Plugin
• Pixieset, How do I upload from Lightroom (Lightroom Classic only, Publish Service behavior), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003504512-How-do-I-upload-from-Lightroom
• Pixieset, Viewing Client Favorites in Lightroom (the Lightroom Copy List, the Find and Contains steps, the IMG_1 and IMG_101 over-selection example, the virtual copy warning, the Capture One filename list path), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003505192-Viewing-Client-Favorites-in-Lightroom
• Pixieset, How do I download my client's Favorites (ZIP or email from Favorite Activity, then manual re-import), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003003931-How-do-I-download-my-client-s-Favorites
• Pixieset, How does the 0% commission fee work (0% on every paid Client Gallery tier, 15% on Free), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975072-How-does-the-0-commission-fee-work